The Movie Juggernaut
You get a movie! You all get a movie!
I have never been an avid consumer of online video content.
However, in the last few days, having been subject to constant chatter about that mind-boggling TV show, and that hilarious movie and that eye-opening documentary, I decided to explore.
I managed to watch two Netflix movies over the past couple of weeks— The Guernsey Literary and Potato peel pie society, and The Last Laugh. I thoroughly enjoyed them regardless of their mediocre-to-poor IMDB rating.
While scrolling through the list of available movies, my only thought was, “That’s a lot of Netflix originals. Like, a lot!”. A quick Wikipedia lookup told me exactly how many.
And I was amazed. Of course, I wanted to put this number in perspective. So, I looked up the titles some of the traditional Hollywood biggies were churning out.
Turns out, in 2018, Netflix produced nearly 20 titles more than the biggest 4 production houses in Hollywood. And this is counting Netflix originals only and does not include movies whose worldwide distribution was handled by Netflix.
And it is not merely numbers. Netflix’s gargantuan scale also comes with an assortment of genres with documentaries and comedies taking a lion’s share of the output from 2014–18.
While English language movies form nearly 90% of the releases, Netflix movies came out in 8 other languages with Spanish, Hindi and French languages making up for 4 movies each.
Netflix spent $12bn on content in 2018 and this number is only expected to grow in the coming year. There’s a reason greats like Steven Spielberg are sounding alarm bells.
The movie juggernaut is coming.
