Why Ted Sarandos — and his son — should be disciplined

It must be nice to be Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Not only is he paid a truly eye-watering amount of money to be in his job (roughly $50 million a year, according to reports), but because of his company’s pre-eminent position in the streaming market, he is interviewed, largely uncritically, by major news titles, even when he says things that are obviously either wrong or deeply stupid.

Thus it has proved in a recent conversation with the New York Times, in which he announced, of last year’s hits Barbie and Oppenheimer, “Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” To add insult to injury, he declared that the size of a screen was all but irrelevant, saying, “My son’s an editor. He is twenty-eight years old, and he watched Lawrence of Arabia on his phone.”

To the interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s credit, this could not pass by without comment, and she responded, “Oh, no” to this piece of sacrilege. Sarandos Jr., who cheerfully markets himself to his 536 followers on X as a “Production Executive/Editor/Film Maker” will presumably not be worrying too much about what will happen if work dries up as the result of his attitudes being met with the contempt they clearly deserve. Lawrence of Arabia is one of the pieces of cinema that loses vast amounts of its impact if it isn’t seen on the big screen — the feeling of arid heat and sun-induced overwhelm has to be viewed communally, in a theater, for full effect. The idea of some twenty-eight-year-old believing that it’s just as effective — or, for that matter, just as boring — viewed on an iPhone is somewhere between ludicrous and depressing.

Yet Sarandos’s interview was largely upbeat and cheerful — and it isn’t hard to see why. The service had an unexpected breakout megahit this year with Baby Reindeer, just as it did with Squid Game a couple of years ago, and the CEO is patting himself on the back for managing to escape the fallout that has enveloped the show’s creator Richard Gadd, although the threat of legal action from Fiona Harvey, who is thinly disguised as Gadd’s stalker “Martha,” may yet wipe the smirk off his face. And its slate might attract disbelief and ridicule when it comes to many of its original films, such as the immediately ridiculed Lindsay Lohan vehicle Irish Wish, of which Sarandos could comment, “Irish Wish is great! You love a romcom,” but then say, without blushing, that “I am going by the numbers, how many people watch it. I mean, people watch the whole thing.”  

The difficulty that cinema is facing currently is that, whether or not we believe that Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan would have been happy to sell their films to Netflix and thus miss out on the mega-grosses that both pictures enjoyed, mainstream movies are flopping as never before. The stars of the Barbenheimer movies, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, were reunited in the recent action-comedy The Fall Guy, which duly flopped. The Mad Max prequel Furiosa has just disappointed at the box office, in no small part, perhaps, because it overestimated its largely male audience’s interest in a female-led action film, in which the biggest star in the film, Chris Hemsworth, wears a false nose and plays a ridiculous villain. I don’t hold out much hope that the next Deadpool film, in which he teams up with Wolverine, will do much to turn the tide, despite being the only superhero film release of the year. People are bored of Ryan Reynolds, bored of Marvel and, clearly, bored of spending money to go to the movies.

I am by no means a skeptic when it comes to Netflix; if I see many more gripping or upsetting things on television this year than Baby Reindeer, I’d be astonished, and I give the company credit for giving the likes of David Fincher and Martin Scorsese apparently unlimited budgets to make their passion projects. Yet if Sarandos seriously believes that Gerwig and Nolan can somehow be coopted to make content for the streaming giant, and that their carefully composed and painstakingly edited movies are just as enjoyable on an iPhone screen as at the IMAX, then my subscription will be coming to an end faster than you can say “multiplex.” Time will tell if anyone follows my example.