In April 2025, somehow only 18 months ago, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos participated in a public conversation that began with Time magazine’s editor-in-chief asking him a simple question: “Have you destroyed Hollywood?” It was meant as a cheeky icebreaker, and Sarandos — a smirk cracking across his face — gave the exact response you would expect from a disruptor of his wealth and power: “No, we’re saving Hollywood.”
They were saving Hollywood from the very reason it exists in the first place, and the reason — the only reason — why it continues to exert a peerlessly disproportionate influence on the collective imagination: movie theaters. “We’re in a period of transition,” Sarandos elaborated later in the panel. “Folks grew up thinking, ‘I want to make movies on a gigantic screen and have strangers watch them [and to have them] play in the theater for two months and people cry and sold-out shows’ …It’s an outdated concept.”
Cut to: October 2026. Hollywood is in a more precarious state than ever, and Netflix just rented out New York’s biggest AMC to stage a trailer premiere for the most crucial movie the company has ever made, an event where “Narnia” director Greta Gerwig was interviewed by Stephen Colbert in front of a massive IMAX screen as an audience of journalists munched on candy and popcorn. The screen was gigantic. Gerwig cried. When “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” opens in theaters next February, it will play there exclusively for (almost) two months before it’s available to watch on Netflix. Sarandos was right about one thing: We are in a period of transition. It’s just not the transition he had in mind.
Ever since Netflix entered the straight-to-streaming film space with “Beasts of No Nation” back in 2015, their ultimate goal — as unstated as it is unambiguous — has been nothing less than the complete elimination of movie theaters. They became the first content delivery service to transform into a major Hollywood studio, and then the first major Hollywood studio to try to transform Hollywood into a content delivery service. For more than 100 years, the film industry depended on selling movie tickets; Netflix’s agenda was to cut out the middleman and make subscribing to the service feel as obligatory as owning a smartphone. They even bought a few historic theaters along the way to make the process as smooth and gentle as possible.
Netflix didn’t operate that way because they’re more evil than any of the other movie studios (not even Sarandos has the hubris required to compete with Davids Zaslav and Ellison in that regard) — they operated that way because they’re a tech company that only became a movie studio as a means to an end. And tech companies have a funny way of acting like fourth-dimensional colonizers whenever they get too close to the arts.
If your business is to make things that people want to see, your top priority is to produce movies — ideally but infrequently good movies — and project them in large auditoriums where customers can pay a modest fee to experience them as they were meant to be seen. If your business is to sell people on a future they may not want to see, your top priority is to make the present seem obsolete. The present can become the past in a second, but it takes billions of dollars to make that process feel slower than it should. To make the present feel worthless and unwanted before its time is up. To convince people that it isn’t just passing by, but also holding them back.
Sarandos might be a lifelong cinephile whom Netflix originally hired for his deep background in film distribution, but there’s no doubt he’s a tech bro now. I can’t really blame him for that. The guy is both a product and an emblem of his times, and though I’m hard-pressed to think of another studio executive who’s ever made my blood run hotter on such a regular basis, I suspect that the likes of Darryl F. Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer would’ve spouted all the same bullshit had they been tasked with measuring “view hours” and competing against Mr. Beast for our attention. That’s just how tech bros have to talk. Their business models, stock prices, and corporate mystiques require them to act like weird ambassadors from the world of tomorrow — smiling and casual but always bent on destroying whatever it takes to bring their vision of the future to bear.
This is why Netflix has played by Hollywood’s rules only as much as it had to, even when sticking to its prime directive meant leaving free money on the table. They put “movies” into “theaters” to qualify them for awards and keep talent from setting the company’s server farms on fire. But even when major directors pleaded for longer windows — and even when there was a clear public demand for the same thing, as was famously the case with “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” in 2022 — the millions Netflix might have earned in movie ticket sales were no match for the billions they stood to gain from rendering the concept of movie tickets obsolete.
Some filmmakers got the bag, delivered their content, and escaped with their dignity intact. Others happily gulped down the Kool-Aid and embraced a subscription-driven future where satisfying audiences was no longer part of the equation. As Joe Russo put it while promoting “The Gray Man,” everyone’s favorite and most well-remembered film of 2022: “This idea that the theater is a sacred space is bullshit.” Fair enough — if I knew I was about to direct “The Electric State,” I probably wouldn’t be able to shut up about how awful it is that people have to watch movies in public, where the expectation is they’ll sit through the entire thing and maybe even enjoy themselves. It’s barbaric.
Russo also went on to decry the “elitism” of the theatrical experience, echoing — or anticipating — Sarandos’ argument that many people across the country can’t easily get to a multiplex anymore. We’re all trying to find the guy who did that, but the point stands. I will never forget that Ava DuVernay, an outspoken advocate of Netflix’s agenda from the beginning, could only screen “A Wrinkle in Time” in her theater-less hometown of Compton because she convinced Disney to build a pop-up cinema inside a local community center. Ask Netflix to address the lack/uneven distribution of movie theaters, and their solution would be to put them all out of business (all of the ones they don’t own, anyway).
Netflix’s throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater approach hinged on the presumption that people would happily forfeit the possibility of enjoying a proper theatrical experience in exchange for the promise of being able to enjoy “Bright” at home. Like all such acts of mass enshittification, that pivot was sold to the public as progress — as part of a devil’s bargain that sacrificed creativity at the altar of convenience. And, like all such acts of mass enshittification, it was made possible by the fact that the system it was meant to supplant had grown complacent. It’s hard to defend the Union Square Regal as a holy temple of the arts when 10 of its screens are playing Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake of “Aladdin” or whatever.
Of course, that was a blockbuster from the before times, and the COVID pandemic only further empowered Netflix to fulfill its mission. Not only were multiplexes shuttered for months (or years) on end, but the legacy studios fell over themselves to help their streaming rivals make semi-permanent inroads with the public. If parties had been safe to host in December 2020, Netflix would surely have thrown a generational rager to celebrate Warner Bros.’ decision to release “Dune,” “The Suicide Squad,” and 15 other major titles directly to HBO Max. Even as the pandemic began to subside and “Top Gun: Maverick” took flight at the box office two summers later, it seemed as if movie theaters — and the culture that sustained them — would never truly recover from such an unprecedented self-devaluation of corporate assets.
But then a funny thing happened: People kept going to the movies. In fits and starts at first, and then more regularly. In 2023, monocultural events like “Barbenheimer” had to be hyped and telegraphed months in advance before they reached critical mass. By the fall of 2026, a three-hour documentary about a blonde fraudster could become a nationally sold-out sensation with less than five weeks of lead time (although Elizabeth Holmes would argue, of course, that it always could have done that). Altogether, this year’s domestic box office is on track to reach $10 billion, almost matching the numbers from 2019.
There are a number of reasons for that, but I think this is the biggest one: As soon as screens reopened, the movies as a medium were immediately redefined by the ability to experience them in theaters. In an article published almost 10 years ago on this very website, I asked, “When you watch something on Netflix, are you watching a movie, or are you having a movie-like experience?” It was a question prompted by the dawning realization that “film” was becoming something of a misnomer in a world where content was classified less by the nature of its production than by the mechanism of its distribution — and by the gnawing sense that movies weren’t really being seen on Netflix, even on the off chance that someone was actually able to find a good one to watch on the service.
Since then, Netflix has doubled and quadrupled down on the bet that people wouldn’t sweat the difference between algorithmic streaming content and traditional studio fare. Between movies that had been made to satisfy a data point, and movies that had benefited from — or at least been put through — a more elaborate development process. The company hasn’t been completely immune to producing good films, and they’ve certainly spent a lot of money to acquire a variety of great ones (for every “Emilia Pérez” there’s at least one “May December” and several must-see documentaries), but unadvertised vanity runs did little to distinguish masterpieces like “Power of the Dog” from starry imitation slop like “The Adam Project,” and lower-profile gems like “They Cloned Tyrone” and “The World Is Yours” were practically guaranteed to be lost in the shuffle.
Meanwhile, the more determined Netflix became to mimic Hollywood entertainment at home, the further they widened the self-evident perception gap between DTV junk and IMAX-worthy spectacle. “Red Notice” may have been “viewed” by every person on Earth, but nobody remembers watching it. The difference between that and a similarly putrid theatrical release with one of the same stars (let’s go with “Black Adam”) is the difference between scrolling across a funny meme on your phone (face blank and eyes dead as you retweet it with the caption “lol stop I’m fucking DECEASED”) and enjoying a lived experience that has the chance to be remembered by virtue of its shared and unimpeachable reality. To quote Jia Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror,” the more difficult the 21st century makes it to “differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself,” the deeper that movie theaters will become reingrained as a determinative element of the movies themselves. The more difficult AI makes it to differentiate between slop and spectacle, the more people will unconsciously privilege the legitimacy a proper release confers, even on the biggest pieces of shit.
They call it “effort-signaling,” the way labor becomes “an integral character to the point where the final product ends up being a secondary concern.” And by “they,” I, of course, mean “a tweet that I saw while I was writing this article.” Releasing a movie — even a bad movie — requires effort. The future that Ted Sarandos has brought to us (and us to) with the inflexible weight of a destiny is, to his great consternation, a future where people will only be willing to invest themselves in things that someone else has credibly invested themselves in first.
It’s no wonder that Netflix’s streaming competitors have suffered from similar woes in this space. “F1” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” did major numbers at home on the backs of robust theatrical rollouts, while most movies that went straight to Apple TV barely seem to exist. Remember the Justin Timberlake vehicle “Palmer”? Apparently I wrote like 1,200 words about it. What about “Wolfs,” the George Clooney/Brad Pitt/Austin Abrams action-comedy that pivoted away from a wide release less than six weeks before it came out, immediately became Apple TV’s most-viewed film ever, and then sank into the bottomless abyss of lost media just as fast? Not lost, I suppose, but hiding in plain sight.
It’s likewise no wonder that the one Netflix movie that blossomed into a bona fide sensation, of the roughly 4,000 original films they’ve released since 2015, was 1.) produced outside the company, 2.) clearly excellent, and 3.) squarely targeted at children who could obsess over it with their friends all summer long and inhabit its characters through dress-up and singing. “K-Pop Demon Hunters” was a perfect vessel for the kind of engagement Netflix’s entire business model exists to diminish, and I suspect its success was a wake-up call — or at least an early warning sign — that Netflix desperately needed to be saved from itself.
To the company’s sincere credit, they’ve recently made strides towards that end. Netflix’s org chart might be in crisis, and its subscribers are growing increasingly restless about the awful cadence of content worth caring about. But the inevitable pivot toward real theatrical releases will meaningfully raise the profile of their exclusive film titles in the coming months, even if few of them perform as well as “La Bola Negra” has so far.
That pivot represents a rare about-face for a tech giant that has sought to remake the world in its own image, consumer happiness be damned. In the same interview where Sarandos called movie theaters an outdated concept, he also insisted that “Netflix is a very consumer-focused company,” and that “we really do care that we deliver the program to you in a way you want to watch it.” At long last, they seem to have figured out which way that might be.
