There is a few more like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Da Five bloods. Few more as well. But agreed most of their original films are poor.
I read somewhere that their biggest films though are the poor enough ones.
Film Netflix pay $450m for Knives Out sequels
- Thread starter Salt Bailly
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I read somewhere that their biggest films though are the poor enough ones.
Annihilation is quite good.
Agreed. The Perfection was another good one.
There is a few gems. Most are shit though.
Birdbox is supposed to be poor and is one of their biggest.
I thought the film was great fun so would be happy to see more of them. It's like those Agatha Christie adaptations from the 70s with an all-star cast.
I agree it was one of very few post 2010 films I really enjoyed. Finding it difficult to empathize with those who didn't enjoy it.
Yia they are no worse than any other studio. Global quality in TV and Movies is being brought down by the movies people choose to see. More people will see Iron Man 15 than any non franchise much better movie.
Studios now go big for established properties like The Witcher, Lord of the rings, star wars, etc., so it is essentially our fault.
Forgot that, it was really good.
Far too many cine fannies on the Caf. Chin-strokers going on about symbolism and whatnot. It's nice to just be entertained by good acting, good story and interesting characters.
It just didn’t really seem to go anywhere and wasn’t particularly funny. I can’t even remember who did it. Or who died.
Beasts of no Nation and Dolemite is my Name are also very good.
It's a bit of a chicken and the egg situation as well though isn't it. At this stage after a century of cinema it's very hard to create anything truly original that wouldn't be derivative of something. What kind of original Space or Medieval wizard adventures could someone come up with that wouldn't be largely similar to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings?
In which case you can't really blame studios for just going with the properties that have the established name recognition familiar to several generations of potential movie goers.
Quoting simon's post again, but to better understand the whole deal of overpaying for a 'mediocre/middling' propery, one needs to understand that this move is also an attempt to seriously wound an already struggling Lionsgate, the distributor of the first movie.
Wealth may well be infinite.
Thank you. Some real context.
The Alex Garland interpretation of the book? That was Netflix? That was good.
I've got a couple of ideas for some great biopics for Netflix. Great subject matter but I need a decent screenwriter.
Netflix bought it after it was finished. They're are the ones that tend to turn out good.
It doesn't help that their UI is based around a simple array of boxes with one of the same four fonts splashed on the front and a generic looking shot from the movie/show. The description is usually short and pointless and since they did away with the rating system you don't have any quick way to telling if the product is okay or utter shite. At least Prime has the IMDb ratings and star system.
It just find myself scrolling through and ignoring anything with the Netflix Original branding, which is the majority of their stuff now. They really need to change the look of their service or start making more quality, heavily advertised stuff and less filler.
Sequels make sense in that they're operating within a genre where series of films/books connected by the same detective character are standard. Once it was successful it made sense to make more.
The key thing with the first one is that it had quite broad age-appeal. Crowd-pleasing family films that can appeal to such a broad range of age groups are relatively rare, I think? Certainly ones that garner that sort of critical praise. I quite enjoyed it for the the playful fun it was.
Also Craig's accent was obviously awful but that's part of the fun.
The key thing with the first one is that it had quite broad age-appeal. Crowd-pleasing family films that can appeal to such a broad range of age groups are relatively rare, I think? Certainly ones that garner that sort of critical praise. I quite enjoyed it for the the playful fun it was.
Also Craig's accent was obviously awful but that's part of the fun.
I've written a screenplay. Came second at the Austin film festival category for new writers. Got optioned by a studio. True story. To this day hasn't been made unfortunately.
I guess that's true. I'm just curious if there is actually something that indicates that global film quality is declining, or if fewer good movies are coming out. Again, I'm not disputing it, just asking.
This was also an interesting point, that I suppose speaks to the comment on Netflix being a predatory actor in all this:
I agree. Netflix has far more interesting content than I can easily find, but given that there is so much and I don't necessarily know what I'm looking for, it's really hard to get to it. I mean, I'd love to watch much more international quality content, and would generally far prefer that over another big Hollywood production; but that's not what Netflix is giving me in its many lines of randomly made up movie categories.
What are you waiting for? Needs too much budget?
Like a shite poirot
The way it snaps up films and holds them ransom on its platform, depriving them of theatrical distribution, the bail out deal it struck with American Cinemateque to show Netflix films at The Egyptian as part of an "expanding programming" deal, the way it can pay up front for major releases, the exclusivity deals it can strike with the biggest directors like Scorsese, Spike Lee, The Coens, the way independent filmmakers are pressured to surrender their films with the promise of financial reimbursement.
One, or a tiny number of platforms being responsible for all, or most of the film presentation and curation sounds like a bad thing.
Rather see them put big money into a project like At The Mountains of Madness.
Not my choice. Studio decides if they are going to make it or not. It’s their property now. They option it to take it off the market. They have tons if scripts that will never see the light of day. It’s been 10 years now, so doubt it’ll ever get made. Great experience though and it’s pretty hard to get a deal like that without connections as a new writer. I got lucky. I submitted it speculatively to the competition, and came in second. An agent was present in the reading, liked it and called me.
Yes, $20,000 for the option. Much more if it got made. I was fairly young at the time, 29, so it felt like a lot of money for something I never thought I’d be able to get into the right hands.
It was a good film but 450 mill seems absurd. It won't be a blockbuster franchise.
Cant even remember anything about it. That’s how good it was for me. Yes, I have seen it.
Seems an astonishing amount of money. Who else wanted these rights to push up the price?
That's nuts! Have you written any more since? Can you tell us what it was about?
I'll never forgive them for axing The OA after the epic second season and that twist ending. cnuts.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm not very fussed about theatrical releases (not enough of a purist I suppose), but I agree with the single platform thing. Although I would also argue that Netflix makes things more rather than less accessible. I mean, how else would I get access to the vast majority of films on there? It's not like I'd have any chance of seeing anything but the biggest international films in cinema where I live, and most international stuff won't be on tv either. Netflix has given me access to (a curated section of) global cinema that would otherwise have remained completely closed to me. (I don't do downloads anymore.) How do you see that?
Written a few short stories. Not much else. Ended up getting an MBA and working for an investment firm. Got placed as CEO of a distressed company in their portfolio 4 years ago and been there since. Sports and Entertainment. Doesn’t leave much time for anything else. Especially as I’m a single parent to a five year old little girl too.
Story is hard to explain. But here it is in a couple of sentences.....It about the nature of luck and how it affects life cumulatively. Two identical twins whose paths diverge over 45 years through series of minor differences day to day attributed to luck. One is a CEO, the other very particular type of scientist. The “unlucky” one ultimately discovers that luck is a tangible thing that can be isolated in a compound, and he manages to develop a serum in small concentrations. The sort of concentrations that would give you every day great luck. As it progresses, he is able to stabilise it to work in larger concentrations and generate more outrageous turns of fortune.It’s not until it’s seemingly almost too late that he realised that he and his twin are inextricably linked through their luck profiles and by making himself “lucky” he has been making his previously lucky brother become unlucky. Because things have always just worked out for the lucky brother, when fortunes turn his whole world turns out to be a house of cards as he’s taken outrageous risks, and now it’s all coming crashing down. In a final twist, the newly lucky brother seeks to give his twin a huge dose of the serum to redress the balance, knowing he will consequently suffer a proportionate dose of bad luck. Self sacrifice if you will. But while he can induce the events, he can’t control how they manifest; meaning a huge sense of irony to both their fates.
Sounds a bit shit i know. But there were some nice plot points, and I loved the ending. Most of the drama and humour was dark and dry. Somewhere in the In Bruges or The Weatherman genre, but nowhere near as good.
Simon probably knows this, but minor bit of trivia for anyone else: normally an option deal includes some combination of a rights reversion period, terms for the maintenance of the option, and specified fees for extension of the period. TL;DR a screenplay option is kind of like renting it. It's different from buying all rights to the work outright. It's kind of like a stock option in that the buyer is securing the exclusive right to buy the screenplay once financing is secured.
If the 'buyer' options something for X years and does nothing with it, the option expires and the creator is free to sell the rights again. If the buyer can't show that they've made a 'reasonable' effort to produce the project within that timeframe, the option expires and the creator is free to sell the work again. The buyer can pay the pre-arranged fees to extend the period.
I did 10 years for $20k. Technically expired now. Last year. But no desire to revisit it. Not even sure where the original file is. On an old hard drive somewhere. I had options for anywhere from 2 to 10 years.
To be honest I would watch that, so revisit it and sell to Netflix.
Do you have a twin by any chance?
As with all these hub platforms like Spotify and Amazon shopping, Netflix offers huge benefits to the consumer (those you listed and more) and I generally try not to begrudge anyone for using them (although Amazon is a shame on us all). I use predatory as an accurate description of their behaviour, irrespective of any moral judgement I may or may not have of their business practices.
Certainly Netflix makes certain things much more accessible than previous methods of distribution, in term of pure numbers the quantity of available product is unrivalled, short of using torrents. I've never had Netflix but was under the impression that the variety could be fairly limited, at least that seems a fairly common complaint. I know they invest in a few specialist sections here and there (they had an early women filmmaker section for a while that I was bummed not to have access to) but I would expect these sections to be limited. That said for 8 quid or whatever it is a month it's a complete bargain.
I've watched and enjoyed Netflix productions before and understand the appeal. However I do think that their continued apparent (because who knows with their secretive financial situation) success could be damaging to cinema/film as an artistic medium, and not just in the knock on affects of a decline in theatre admissions. The old studio system could also be stifling to the medium but it also often promoted artistic innovation and supported film for the sake of art. There were also more studios and voices within each than seem vocal inside Netflix. I believe that Netflix necessarily favour the commercial over the artistic, and to a degree that is worrying. I would say this is demonstrated by their output so far. I don't know if filmmakers suffer in the same way that musicians do at the hands of Spotify but it wouldn't surprise me if they faced similarly bad deals.
I also have an unrealistic, romantic view that says custodians of art have a cultural obligation to display the art publicly, and that seems at odds with the mentality of hoarding films for distribution inside private living rooms.
Haha thanks. I do not.