The full effect of Netflix on the film industry, positive or (more likely) negative, will be reverberating for years to come. But in the short term, they’ve made some undeniably great movies, mostly through the strategy of giving money to great directors and appearing to let them do whatever they want (and supplementing those by acquiring already-great movies from film festivals). That’s how you wind up with The Irishman, Marriage Story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Hit Man, Roma, The Power of the Dog, Da 5 Bloods, Rebel Ridge and The Killer, among others.
It’s a lineup that smokes most of the major studios, which was presumably the idea: undercut the competition by stealing the film-makers they established and giving them the world. That particular era of risk-taking may be over for the growth-obsessed company, but they’ve still got plenty of capital to spend, which means more big Netflix movies like The Electric State, a $300m sci-fi adventure starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown that just dropped on the service. Netflix wants to engineer blockbuster spectacles to compete with the biggest movies Hollywood has to offer, and in a feat perhaps even more amazing than securing Noah Baumbach a big budget for White Noise, or improving Adam Sandler’s later-period batting average, they have yet to make one that’s actually good.
