We Need to Talk About Netflix (Premium)

Netflix this month reported its first drop in subscribers in a decade, and everyone is scurrying to write the service’s obituary. That’s more than a bit premature. In fact, it’s nonsensical. But as a long-time Netflix subscriber who pays for its most expensive tier, I do have some thoughts about what went wrong. And how the service can continue to thrive going forward.

But first, it’s important to point out that news of Netflix’s death is greatly exaggerated. And that whatever mistakes it’s made do not in any way point to an imminent downward spiral. Netflix is, by all measures, the single most dominant streaming content service on earth, and it has, by far, the deepest and richest content library. Were I forced to choose just one such service, and regardless of whether I involved my wife and kids, that decision would be simple. It would always be Netflix. Always.

(The only question, really, is what other service(s) we should pay for. That question is complex and ever-changing, as up-and-comers like HBO Max, Apple TV+, and Disney+ are always adding new content. But I listed those in the order I prefer them right now.)

That said, I do remember the moment I started wondering about Netflix. Yes, I’m talking about Ryan Reynolds.

Look, I love Ryan Reynolds. I even liked him when he was making crap like Van Wilder. But some of his more recent movies, like the Deadpool films, which are amazing, and even The Hitman’s Bodyguard (the original, not the sequel), have kind of cemented him as some impossibly funny, wise-cracking character.

But Reynolds suffers from the same problem as anything else you get too much of. At first, it’s just repetitive. And then it becomes almost annoying. And then you really start to wonder about the decisions others are making.

Which is where Netflix comes in. Sometime in the past couple of years, this service started footing what I think of as “pseudo-blockbusters,” or perhaps “B-movie blockbusters,” projects that use the latest inexpensive technologies to make what appear on the surface to be big-budget studio movies. But they’re not. At all. And Ryan Reynolds has popped up in some of these films recently, maybe a few times.

I actually like one of these movies, called 6 Underground, and it’s weird how under-the-radar it is. It just appeared on Netflix one day, and while there are no real A-listers in there besides Reynolds, it’s fun-enough action farce. A bit by the numbers. But you can tell they really visited the locations shown in the film, like Florence, Italy, and Abu Dhabi.

And then Netflix started mailing it in. For Red Notice, it obviously spent all of the money on its three A-list stars---Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson, and Gal Gadot---and it is very clear in watching the film that it was almost entirely made on a green screen soundstage somewhere. The movie depicts a lot of globe-trotting, but they didn’t do a lot of actual traveling. And the movie itself fe...