Inside Netflix Inc.'s movie studio, top executives lobbied Ted Sarandos, the company's co-chief executive, for much of this year to experiment with releasing more Netflix original movies broadly in theaters.
They outlined their case in a memo shared in June on the company network. Some argued that Netflix is leaving hundreds of millions in box-office receipts on the table with its current strategy of showing only select movies in a few hundred theaters for at most a few weeks before streaming them, according to people familiar with the matter.
