When Hulu and HBO and, you know, all the other streamers start to crop up later in the game, it's kind of like you have Netflix and then maybe you try another one. But, like, you're not going to let go of Netflix. Like, Netflix had just already won the war. I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we are going to talk about red DVD envelopes, the streaming wars, and the company that upended Hollywood. Awards season's going to wrap up this month with the Oscars, which means it's a good time to talk about Hollywood. And you can't talk about Hollywood without talking about Netflix. It's honestly difficult to imagine a company that's had a greater impact on the entertainment industry over the last two decades. Since its founding in the late 90s, Netflix has continued to do one thing over and over again, and that's use technology and the internet to exploit convenience and wind its way into our lives. First, it was a website that allowed you to pick your favorite DVDs to be shipped to you in the mail. Then it launched into streaming, original programming, a full movie studio. Now Netflix hosts live TV, award shows, sporting events. It's even a home for podcasts. And the company now has more than 325 million subscribers. Netflix's story follows the classic tech company arc. The platform didn't just disrupt how people watch movies and TV. It changed the culture and the fabric of entertainment altogether. Netflix has influenced the way that many movies look and feel and sound, even how they're conceived of and greenlit. And the company has just had its hand in creating everything. From autoplay, second screen, binge mode, algo slop, to prestige award-bait projects. All of Hollywood's hopes and anxieties, the decline of theater going, data-driven writers' rooms, you name it. Netflix sits at the center of all of it. And it's a weird moment for the company. Back in December, Netflix made an offer to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. It was a deal that was worth approximately $82.7 billion. And that purchase would have made Netflix arguably the world's most powerful entertainment company. But Paramount Skydance, headed by David Ellison and backed in part by his father, the sent to billionaire founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, fought the deal. Paramount Skydance submitted a revised offer to buy Warner at $111 billion. And Netflix backed out of the deal last week. Now, some industry observers argued that Netflix dodged a bullet. Or at least, they dodged a lot of debt and regulatory headaches by backing out. But now, Netflix is at something of a crossroads. And that's why I've called on my colleague David Sims. David is a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where he's our film critic, and he writes about the culture of entertainment. He's also the host of the excellent podcast, Blank Check. I wanted to talk to David about Netflix's historical arc, how it became such a juggernaut, and what it's done to transform Hollywood and all the ways that we consume entertainment. By all accounts, it feels like Netflix has won. And is that a good thing, or a bad thing, or just inevitable? David joins me now to hash it all out. But first, a quick break. David Sims, welcome to Galaxy Brain. Hi, Charlie. Thanks for having me. We're approaching the terminus of awards season and the Oscars. We also just had a lot of news around Netflix, Warner Brothers, Paramount, media consolidation, growth, hellscape, landscape, etc. So I wanted to have a conversation about Netflix broadly. Netflix's impact on Hollywood, on the industry, on all of us and our eyeballs and our fragile little primate brains. So I thought it would be great to just start off very quickly. What is your first memory of Netflix, your first Netflix experiment? I feel like it gets referenced in the OC in maybe 2005. Well, I'll make sure to Netflix that this weekend so that I can be up to speed on your little theory. That was the first time that I was kind of like, oh, this is like breaking containment. Like, you know, regular people are doing this. This is getting referenced. Like, people know about getting your discs in the mail. You gotta remember just, I mean, and I feel like this is almost forgotten now. Like, DVDs were so vital to the sort of ecosystem of Hollywood, right? Like, home video for years had been this, like, sort of profit, you know, add-on, and that was fine. And then DVDs come out, and it basically meant that you could make the worst movie of all time, kind of bomb in the box office, like, kind of not work out. And then you're gonna still make, like, 40 million extra dollars. Like, just from DVDs. It was a glorious era for Hollywood. And Netflix was just additive. Like, yes, all they were doing was buying discs and then sending them out to people in the mail, but it was just all part of like this wonderful cycle of like extending a movie's life and getting it out to more people. And yeah, as a college student, it was perfect for me. I got the three disc plan. I don't know if you did. Some people only did one. I would always have three. So I would have one disc that was a TV show and then like one disc that was my next movie to watch and one disc that I was like sending off like, you know, like that I had just finished. Like that was sort of my Netflix cycle back in the day. I'm curious, do you feel like, and this is going to be a bit of a theme of the conversation, I think. Did Netflix's DVD business kill video stores or was it did it accelerate something that was already happening? They were already kind of like on their way out. Like, how do you see that influence? Netflix murdered Blockbuster in the way that like Amazon killed Borders or whatever, where it's sort of like Blockbuster had hastened its own demise. Like Blockbuster was ready to be killed. And it's a bit of an urban legend. I think that like it was a sort of one-to-one, like Netflix came in and Blockbuster ended. But, you know, it was just kind of like the internet is here. People want to pick their movies on a computer. Netflix let them do that. I'm conflicted because in one sense, I refuse to listen to any Blockbuster slander in any capacity. You had me on your show, so I'm going to slander the hell out of Blockbuster. Sorry. I know. But also at the same time, I think this is a pattern with tech disruption, but also with Netflix throughout the history of the company, which is this idea of, like, did Netflix accelerate certain things? What is Netflix responsible for? Which parts of the changes in Hollywood is Netflix responsible for? But what I want to get to is, so we have the DVD, and then Netflix decides to launch this streaming service, right? And what I found in researching this that I enjoyed is it launches a streaming service, company's stock drops 6% on that. And it seems like there was, at the moment, a little bit of like, this is a really stupid idea. You guys have it all with this physical media. Yeah. Of course, looking at that now, that seems kind of ridiculous. But I'm curious from your perspective, if you can walk me through a little bit about how Hollywood reacted to all of that, right? Like how the early days of streaming, how that kind of changed the industry or how people were thinking about that inside Hollywood. I think they weren't thinking about it much at all. Like, every time streaming stuff happens in the sort of narrative of TV, Hollywood, movies, whatever, it catches them completely off guard and they have no concept of it as anything but a novelty. So, like, the whole thing with Netflix, when it starts up the streaming site, I mean, I remember looking at it in 2007 on my, like, cruddy Dell laptop that I'm sure took, like, would start wheezing and issuing steam if I tried to stream, like, a movie on it. But it was crazy because like every movie was available because every studio was like, yeah, sure, you can have our entire second run library. Like, that's fine. Where do we care? Like, do what you want. Like, what, you know, how many people could even use this service? And like there was this sort of brief, like kind of free for all kind of just like Wild Westy feeling to the streaming stuff because Hollywood was like, this is how we make our money. The movie comes out in theaters. That makes us money. We put it on home video. That makes us more money. And then we put it, we sell it to cable TV. That makes us more money. Netflix is like, that's a little bit of extra garnish for us. Like, who cares? In that sense, you have these companies not knowing what is going on. Is Netflix in this moment just gathering this information? Because I remember when the streaming thing happened, my first experience with it was, I think it was around Lost, right? Like I had not watched Lost on actual cable at the time. So I was whatever, three and a half seasons behind. And I experienced the binge phenomenon myself. Was Netflix at that time just learning like, okay, they've all, all these fools have let us just, you know, have access to this content. And we are, we now realize, oh, like the people will watch as much as they like physically can with their minds. Did the data collection stuff start at the beginning, you think, with them? Like they always being savvy? It's how much do you want to buy into this sort of Netflix myth. I remember when they had a competition for someone to design a better algorithm than the one they had And this is pre This is back when it was disc rentals But they were like hey if you can beat our recommendations Engin, we'll give you like a million dollars. And I think somebody did this, you know, some coder. That suggests that certainly, of course, as their business is taking off, they start to realize like, right, the most important thing for us is to figure out what people want and how to steer them towards what they want. and how to then, you know, turn that into much more profit for us. So when did, in your mind, Hollywood, when did they catch up to this? What was the moment when they realized this is bad news to have, just be giving all this stuff out? Those are two questions, right? Because it's like the first one, I think it's around 2010, Warner Brothers, like, signed a huge deal with them to stream stuff. So that, I think, is when Hollywood is like, this is a big deal, and it's great news for us. We get money, real money. Like, you know, we're going to start to make real money licensing stuff to streaming. When do they realize that Netflix is going to get into their business and essentially start cannibalizing their business? My guess is that's probably more the sort of, I mean, you could say 2013, which is when they launch House of Cards. But I feel like even that was a little, seen as a little bit of a novelty. And it's not for another year or two that it starts to get a little more freaky. The idea of like a Netflix movie being treated like a real movie, even though it didn't play in a theater, which is the sort of core existential nightmare that many people in Hollywood still struggle with. So this leads to, I guess, right, this is what kicks off the streaming wars, the sort of the golden age of all of that. I feel like. Golden is a pretty loaded word to use for that. But sure. Yes. Well, Golden Age, I guess, though, what I mean in terms of like green lighting shows. Right. And it's like this this notion of competition of, you know, we need to program these things with new original stuff and whether that stuff is algorithmic, you know, fodder based off of, you know, what people will watch or if it's prestige stuff. I'm curious how you see this time, this like mid-2010s time, because it feels like simultaneously there is all this money flowing in. There's all this stuff getting greenlit. It feels like this moment where, you know, Hollywood's really grappling with people not going to the theaters in the same way. And how do you see that moment? Like, was it this period of like, this is good in some ways? Or was it feeling like this is just degrading the art? I mean, so, when's Beasts of No Nation? That's 2015. So that's the first Netflix movie. It was a serious movie that they tried to get awards and all that stuff. And I guess it all happens kind of fast. And so what's happening in Hollywood in the 2010s is Marvel has sort of distracted them all in terms of like, every studio starts to panic that what they need is a gigantic sort of never-ending franchise that they can pump out three editions of a year and like that can be the sort of temples that they build everything else around. And I feel like their eye gets taken off of the streaming, you know, so Netflix sort of starts to rush in to fill the more mid-sized movie space and TV space and everything like that. And obviously the thing that they couldn't really have predicted or it would have been hard for them to spool up as quickly as Netflix does is like Netflix becomes like a utility, Like, everyone has Netflix, right? So when Hulu and HBO and, you know, all the other streamers start to crop up later in the game, it's kind of like you have Netflix and then maybe you try another one. But, like, you're not going to let go of Netflix. Like, Netflix had just already won the war. The only reason I objected to using the golden, like, to me, like, the golden age of TV is what we were just talking about, is the era that Netflix launched out of, which is this sort of simultaneous, the sort of HBO, the prestige cable, all that stuff, like The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, all those shows, and then the sort of glitzy network stuff like Lost and Grey's Anatomy and what have you, that, you know, and the OC, like, that create the binge-watching thing. And so that's the golden age. And then the streaming age is what comes after, which is where Netflix takes the reins and they start making the content. And now it's not actually the TV we liked. It's TV that's sort of designed to be binged. It's designed to be a little, you know, a little easier to watch if you're distracted. And often it feels like, and because the answer of why it feels like this is because this is what it is, movie scripts have been stretched to 10 episodes because people start pitching movies and everyone's like, movies, eh. If your movie doesn't have a superhero, we don't care about it. Could it be a TV show? And so you start to see lots of things get turned into streaming TV that maybe, you know, didn't have enough plot to fill 10 episodes. But if it's on Netflix, people will watch it. So that becomes what we're all dealing with. It's really interesting covering tech and watching the ways that things become so like recursive, right? Like it's basically like you get a thing that's great. And then as technology interacts, interacts with it or works on it, what you get is like a game of telephone with that same thing that is just, you know, degraded. And I think that brings us to like the what you have been talking about, this rise of like the algorithmic friendly entertainment, right? the ambient viewing stuff, the big dumb titles. I saw a Guardian article about Netflix who was talking about how the titles have become so incredibly obvious on some of the more trashy content. And one is just called Tall Girl because it's about a tall girl. Netflix's tall girl. Oh, she's tall. I mean, Hunting Wives. Hunting Wives was a huge hit for them last season. And that was a show that multiple people were like, you should check out Hunting Wives, which I haven't gotten to yet. But where you're like, let me guess. It's about some hunting wives, wives who go hunting. And like, they're so focused on can it be sold, you know, in the carousel, right? Like, can you basically design me a sort of punchy image and a quick title that's going to work as someone is scrolling through like a hundred different opportunities. But then what's funny about Netflix is it will also produce stuff that's really worthwhile. and you can tell when a lot of the sort of controls were waived, right? Where there was probably less studio notes of like, and make sure it works on a phone and make sure people explain the plot five times during the episode. You know, where an auteur who Netflix takes seriously is being given, you know, a lot of room to make a passion project or something like that because Netflix knows, like, the occasional sort of awardsy bump is really helpful to the bigger experiment. So you have the Netflix collecting all this data about what people are watching, what they're doing. It leads to the creation of some of these shows like House of Cards, which end up being eminently watchable, still feeding into that prestige, even if it is a little on the maybe slightly trashier side. And what we see now, though, is this collection of more and more and more and more information to create these ambient style shows, these second screen style shows, right? The shows that you're just supposed to be doom scrolling and you can watch people announce what they're doing all the time in there. And I'm curious, has Netflix learned the wrong lessons from all of this? Like they were using the data in service of something that is like relatively high quality. Now they're like, are they, is the data just like degrading the brand and all of what they're producing. I guess the argument against that they've learned the wrong lessons is that Netflix is successful and profitable and lots of people subscribe to it. And so if you just follow the money, they're right and we're wrong, right? But like, I feel like there's no really good argument for why some of their, so much of their TV, especially TV, needs to be made in a way that almost assumes the viewer is not paying attention, right? Like the idea of when I call it a second screen show or whatever, if like someone's basically scrolling Instagram while they have the Netflix show on in the background. So the Netflix show needs to be sort of obnoxiously loudly plotted as possible so people can kind of track what's going on. It's assuming the worst to your viewer. And so much of good TV sort of assumes the best of its viewer, right? Like assumes that viewers can pay attention and figure things out and maybe talk to each other if they didn't figure something out. And it sort of points to, I feel like a lot of dissatisfaction a lot of people have with how TV is these days. Like, why is it like this? It's like, well, they're kind of assuming the worst of you. This is maybe an unanswerable follow up to that. But do you think people will just lap up all the slop for as long as possible? Like, like, is there a point where and I feel this way about like content everywhere, right? Like, are we going to reach a point where people are like, I just stop? Like, I like stop debasing me with this thing. Like, will people stop watching things? I don't think so. It you know has the world broadened you know to the point of like a thousand points of life versus like three networks of TV you know back in the 50s and 60s Yes So I suppose the answer is like well they always going to have the choice to watch something else But that's why the game Netflix has played of we need to have the biggest user base has worked out for them in terms of like, yeah, well, sure, maybe people want to watch something else. But more likely they're going to use the thing they pay for because it's the easiest option. I want to see how many of the 10 most popular shows globally of all time in Netflix that you could guess before just totally giving up. What do you think is the most popular Netflix show? Stranger Things. Is it Stranger Things? Either Stranger Things or Squid Games. Squid Games. It's not. It's neither. Okay, what is it? It is Wednesday. That would have been my third guess, which is one of those things that you're like, does anyone ever talk about Wednesday? I know it was unambiguously a hit. It was unambiguously seen. But it's not like you walk the streets hearing people go, I can't wait for more Wednesday. Not only that, but that season one is the most viewed. But Wednesday season two is the fifth most. So it's like it did have the staying power. But Stranger Things 4 comes in at three. So it's not even the second. And Squid Game is not number two. Do you have one more guess at what number two might be? Is it Bridgerton? No. Is it, huh? Because I'm sure there's also like reality stuff I'm not considering. I'll give you a hint. And it's not Squid Game. It's more prestigious than you might think. More prestigious. Is it House of Cards? It is Adolescence. Oh, Adolescence. Wow. No, but that, so that all speaks to something that is almost illogical. But I guess it's just their audience has gotten so much bigger that like you'd think like, oh, yeah, well, surely something like a legacy show for them like House of Cards or Orange is the New Black or whatever built up the bigger audience. But no, like when Adolescence was such a smash last year, it was playing to the most subscribers Netflix had or had in their history. So, yeah, that makes sense. but it all just speaks to like exactly what you said which is the like one of the things that netflix has done is like divorced it's added to like the weirdness of popular culture right like one of my big hobby horses is nobody knows what anyone is doing because of the internet like no one knows what anyone's watching no one knows what anyone's like everyone knows everyone's opinions but doesn't really know if they actually believe them or like what's happening and this is such a good like wednesday is such a good example of this, like a true phenomenon. Undeniable phenomenon. But that doesn't really, it certainly penetrates popular culture, but not in the Seinfeldian, like what's going to happen on ER tonight kind of way. It's just, it's super weird. But yeah, I'm glad that it stumped you. I was going to be mad at you. You did a good job stumping me. I mean, it's just like the reheated sort of nachos element of Wednesday is just, it is a great way to think about what Netflix brings to the table. And Netflix has made good television and it's made good movies. I'm not saying it hasn't, but like a Tim Burton directed, like Tim Burton in his Twilight years directed a spinoff of Adam's family. That's like kind of a high school drama with a murder mystery. It just sounds like something a Netflix algorithm came up with. And no wonder it was a smash hit for them. Like that's why they have these programs like that's why they do the things that they do but will anyone to use a bill simmons ism like will anyone be like bouncing someone on their knee to talk about wednesday season one when they're a grandpa like i don't think so i'm curious with this like the algorithm friendly big dumb potentially trashy entertainment stuff you mentioned like to some degree how it looks to right like this this feeling that like even the even everything from like the palette to it all feels very like scroll phone based or it doesn't really matter because it's second screen stuff. How much of this has seeped into modern filmmaking? Like broadly speaking, the Netflixification of it. I would say some. It's sort of a larger crisis or a larger sort of like existential question in commercial art right now, which is like, why does everything look this way, right? I was recently watching Michael Bay's Transformers for reasons I can't really explain. You don't need to explain yourself. And I, you know, it's a movie that has some coherence issues and it's a movie about robots that turn into cars and all that. But I was just like, God, this looks so good. It's so well lit. It's so thoughtfully made, like as much as it's silly, like visually. And now is the reason that all the movies kind of look like that, which by which I mean is sort of like they're a little flat. They're a little kind of underlit. everything looks just a little staid. Is that because of Netflix? Is that because things need to be viewable on multiple different, you know, phone, iPad, TV, cinema screen? Is it because some people blame kind of like, oh, the way visual effects work these days, they prefer less lighting. I've heard that. I have no idea. Some people say it's because actors now have like, they arrive at set with their own lighting portfolio and you have to light them a certain way so you're not allowed to make artistic choices anymore. I've heard that as well. I don't know. But I do think Netflix is kind of part of it in terms of like what's the most crucial to them is that it can be viewed in many different formats and so if your movie is going to go for an artier thing, that might not translate on a smaller screen and that's not going to be good for them. So I want to just give in. I know that was a lot to throw at you there. No, that was, honestly that was great. It's weird because this is again the theme of the conversation to me which is like how much of this is how much is their fault right yeah how much is it just like this is what's happening you know right you do not to just totally skip over all of it where we're where i want to get to but part of it is like if netflix didn't do this if netflix didn't come around in this way wouldn't somebody else just have done this right it just feels like the systems there netflix has exploited it but it's so hard to chicken and egg like right did the evil geniuses at netflix do this to to to our beautiful boy of film you know you cover tech charlie so you can tell me because i think the answer is netflix is maybe an accelerant or maybe a more aggressive you know it's like i feel like this happens in tech a lot but you would know better than me that like there's the established companies that kind of you know rule something like computing or telecommunications or whatever and then a newer thing will come in that's initially disruptive and then becomes a colossus on its own and that's what happened with netflix where it's like you could imagine a world where yes warner brothers are the people who are first with a streaming platform and they they kind of set the tone and it's a little more conservative because it's an old uh legacy company that doesn't want to rock the boat too much but i do feel like often And you need to have this kind of like upstart company set a new tone. And then the, you know, the slower conglomerates sort of like struggle to catch up with. So maybe Netflix is responsible in that way, but it's also like someone's going to do that. So Netflix went through this big messy pursuit, as we mentioned earlier, of Warner Brothers. Ultimately, Paramount comes in over the top, pays a ton of money, has the sort of the Ellison-Trump possible greasing the wheels on getting this through connection. And Netflix gets a nice $2.8 billion termination fee for going through the whole thing. You wrote back in December that Netflix's potential acquisition of Warner could spell doom for cinemas down the line. Outside of even that, it felt like creatives and people in Hollywood were, people were speaking out and just saying that like, this is not good, right? Like they're just scared of Netflix having this power of this consolidation. But I want to talk about that concern in that moment when it seemed like it was going to be Netflix's game to win. And it really kind of Netflix as the apocalyptic force stuck with me. And so I'm curious from that, what is the reputation of Netflix right now in Hollywood? What's sort of interesting about the last six months since the Warner Brothers bidding war broke out is that I feel like there's been a slight softening on Netflix, partly because Netflix really, really ran like a big political campaign within Hollywood to try and convince people we're not the monsters you think we are. And so what happens is, obviously, Warner Brothers, which is this like quite successful, the film branch company, but it's laden with debt. It's being built to sell by David Zaslav for the last couple of years. And I think Zaslav expected Paramount, Universal, the other big studios to try and grab it, essentially to be like, we just need to get bigger. We need to get bigger to fight Disney, to fight Netflix. Then Netflix comes in and, you know, initially wins the bidding war. And everyone starts panicking, as you're saying, because Netflix has just been philosophically hostile to the idea of the sort of classic, like, release it in theaters, let people enjoy it, and a few months later it can hit the internet sort of strategy that's existed for a long time. And everyone immediately is just like, okay, that's it. The biggest movie studio in America that's not Disney, Warner Brothers, is about to vanish from theaters. That will kill theaters. Like, that's it. Like you cannot survive without their like 15 to 20 big movies a year And then you saw people panic so much that Sarandos actually started being like ah no no no it fine I commit to a 45 release window I will honor all of these commitments. Like, Warner Brothers is gonna be its own thing. To the point that people started believing it. We'll never know if he was fully, like, on board or not because it looks like, you know, Paramount's gonna get the company. But it was sort of interesting to watch because I almost started to believe Ted. He's spoken so, you know, disdainfully of the theater experience. But it was kind of this, like, question of, like, why would Netflix spend $80 billion buying a company that releases movies in theaters? It's like buying McDonald's and not selling chicken nuggets or whatever. It's just sort of like, it's how this company makes money. Surely you're not going to buy, you know, Warner Brothers just to sort of prove some point, right? The Netflix concern was this much more kind of like artistic, philosophical concern, right? Where it's like no one can really deny that Netflix is a well-run company. No one's really worried about where their money comes from. They can afford Warner Brothers. Whereas Paramount is like, don't worry, we got like 80 countries to help us. It's like, you know, we're going to have $75 billion of debt, but it's fine. And everyone's like, okay, you know, but I just never really understood why Netflix would want Warner Brothers in terms like, Netflix has just always been a very kind of, apart from the quickster nightmare that they did like a million years ago, they've always been very focused. They grow at the right scale. They know what they're doing and they know like what the next step is. And this felt like a very weird next step for them to be taking. Do you think some of it is truly just about power? Like at a certain point, you just have to show that you've won. I'm fascinated, too, by this idea of being so hostile to the theater experience. Like, is that just because like that, that's our DNA, baby. Like we, as soon as we started doing the DVDs and allowing you to, you know, bring them home, which is obviously how the company started, we have always just been protective of the home experience. And that's just who we are. And we won't stray from that. I don't know. I feel like the only way that you could you could think about it because of that is this idea of just like power, right? Of the tech mindset of just like we have to scale. Like scale is just if you don't scale, you die. And we have to find weird ways to scale now because we are so big. I think that's part of it. I think it's sort of this like never ending need to grow and Netflix buying, you know, Warner Brothers and HBO. That's growth, baby. Like especially them adding the HBO stuff like no doubt like that's something maybe that would indicate an even bigger future for them. And also, yes, you're fighting off consolidation from other studios, which I guess would be designed to rival you. Yeah. And not to be all like go all late stage capitalism on this. But at the same time, it's like this is what this is the logic of like tech companies of this like of hyperscale. But, you know, they have they have a subscriber ceiling in the sense that you just can't get everyone to come do this. Right. Like you do grow to this point. And you can't, I mean, maybe you can raise the price forever, but at some point people will probably look around and say, okay, I am paying $60 a month for this thing. I don't know that I really want it, whatever. And they're staring down the thing that always befalls these successful tech companies, which is, you know, expectation of the forever growth. So what do you think is next for Netflix now, post-Warner? So Ted Sarandos has sort of said in these post-mortem interviews, like, I think we can do more stuff with theaters. Like, he's really trying to push the change of tune. and it the funniest outcome of all this would be netflix being like we're going to operate a little bit more like an old school prestige movie studio we'll still be a tv company a streaming tv company and that'll be like our big profit engine but we want to actually rebrand to something a little classier because we see how much you guys freaked out last year that could happen it doesn't strike me as like the best way to growth but like i don't really know how they could possibly grow Like they are they are the biggest. It's an amazing like head game to to play. Right. If you're always one step ahead and pushing people in a direction that makes them feel uncomfortable, like if that's the Netflix legacy with Hollywood, make make people do things they don't feel comfortable doing. Creating this streaming paradigm in this this way that everyone has to catch up to you as soon as they start to catch up to you, you just say, no, we're actually going to do what you guys did. Thanks for spending all that money on completely changing your business around. we're going to go back to that, you know, a year ahead of you. That would be kind of like the trolling school of business, but I kind of love it. I kind of love it too. I just feel like Ted Sarandos is sort of on as much of a high as he's ever been right now in terms of like, everyone's mad at David Ellison right now, and everyone's mad at David Zaslav, and people actually kind of aren't mad at me. And Netflix not getting to buy Warner Brothers prompted like a week of articles of people being like, you know, Netflix isn't so bad. The other, you know, elephant in the room is the pivot to the generative void, right? The let's just try to churn out movies without having all these messy people being involved. And that's the evil version. And they can do the good and the evil. They could make like, we're going to make art movies. And also, by the way, we will have like an AI channel that just like shoots slop into your ears. I don't like, they could do both, right? The good bet is both for sure. I would imagine. Okay, so to kind of land the plane here, I want to just like get your assessment on this whole arc, right? Because I think it's really easy to start adding all of this stuff up the, you know, the ambient entertainment, the we must announce what characters are doing 25 times because no one's actually paying attention. you know, all that, all that stuff. Netflix has in one way, just for, you know, two decades, exploited convenience. And that is not necessarily a bad thing, right? Like, I don't think we have to clutch our pearls about that. Convenience is good sometimes. But there's also been this complete and total impact on the industry at large, but also with us as consumers, what we expect out of entertainment now, how we want to watch it, our viewing, our consumption habits have changed alongside the production habits of it. And so I'm just curious, like, where are you as a critic, as a reporter on the culture of all of this, like, where do you kind of net out on it, right? If everyone right now is sort of like, maybe Netflix isn't so bad, like, where are you when you think about this arc? Where do you fall? I am sorry to come off as an entertainment centrist, but that is basically what I am. I love that, look, when I was a teenager, if there was an art movie, right, that came out in theaters in limited release, you know, New York and LA and San Francisco and, you know, like Chicago, the chances of it reaching me before I hit home video were, like, if I didn't live in some big city, were tiny. And I love that you can get a movie like that in front of people within a few months on the internet, on Apple, on, you know, all the Amazon rental, like all that stuff, while also giving it a run in theaters. Like, that to me seems like a great way to sort of preserve the medium that film critics like I love without, you know, annihilating it while, like, embracing convenience. What I've never understood about Netflix is why there needs to be, like, a monotheistic platform, right? Like, where it, like, you simply must ingest it the way we want you to ingest it. You have to binge the TV. You have to watch the movie at home. all that like just make all things available to all people in all ways like it's a great way to get art into people's eyes like they can pick how they want to experience it is that so wrong am i am i so evil to be to just be you know wanting everything for everyone i i don't know i mean like i i think some of these companies are like no it's a competition and we need to win it i've never really understood that like to me it's just like everyone should to just try to make the best stuff they can and get it to people every way that they can. In exchange, they can get money, which is kind of like how the whole thing, how the whole business thing is supposed to work. It's insecurity, I guess is the best way to put it. Like even though Netflix won, they're still basically like, yeah, but you know, how do we know you're not going to leave us tomorrow for Peacock? David, thank you so much for trying to make sense of this. I'm doing my best. Thank you, Charlie, for having me on. That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, David Sims. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Braindrop every Friday. You can subscribe to the Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and David's work and the work of all my colleagues at the Atlantic, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com slash listener. That's theatlantic.com slash listener. Thanks so much. And I'll see you on the air. This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Rene Klar and engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Rob Smersiak. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Thank you.
