Scott Stuber, Netflix's highest ranking film executive since 2017, is leaving the streaming giant he says to start his own production company.
Stuber will remain at Netflix through mid-March. Netflix content chief Bela Bajaria is in charge of finding his replacement.
Bloomberg first reported the news.
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“Seven years ago, Reed and Ted offered me the amazing opportunity to join Netflix and create a new home for original movies,” Stuber said in a statement. “I am proud of what we accomplished and am so grateful to all the filmmakers and talent who trusted us to help tell their stories. Thank you to Ted, Reed, Greg, Bela and the entire team, and I look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.”
Overseeing Netflix's film efforts since 2017, Stuber, a former Universal Pictures executive, was in charge of the platform's most popular -- and poorly reviewed -- titles, including The Bird Box, Extraction, Red Notice and Don't Look Up.
He also led Netflix to its biggest streaming largesse, with 2021 Russo Bros. action-thriller The Gray Man priced at a box-office-summer-blockbuster-like $200 million to make.
But lately, the hits seemed to have dried up a bit for Netflix. As the graphic below reveals, only two films on Netflix's all-time most popular English-language movies lists were released after 2022, The Mother and Extraction 2.
And both titles reside on the back half of that list, even though they were released in 2023, a year in which Netflix's global user base had grown to exceed 247 million users. It only had around half as many subscribers when Bird Box was released at the end of 2018.
