Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, while speaking at a Time 100 event, was asked if Netflix is destroying Hollywood. His reply? The streaming giant is, instead, “saving Hollywood.”
“Netflix is a very consumer-focused company. We really do care that we deliver the programming to you in the way you want to watch it, that it’s programming you love and desire, so we don’t let a lot of other outside forces get in the way of that,” Sarandos said.
He commented on recent statistics that the box office was down as a way of consumers saying “we like to watch movies at home, thank you.” “The studios and theaters duking it out over this 45-day window, which is completely out-of-step with the consumer experience,” Sarandos noted. He described the idea of making movies for the big screen – “have strangers watch them and play in the theaters for months” – as “an outdated concept.”
Sarandos briefly backpedaled, saying the idea of going to a movie theater isn’t an “outmoded idea” for everybody: “If you are fortunate enough to live in Manhattan and can walk to a multiplex and see a movie, but most of the country cannot.”
He also said that he loves movies and theaters, but the lack of a theatrical experience doesn’t totally bother him. “What would bother me is if people stopped making great movies,” Sarandos explained. “If we want people to watch them the way we want them to watch them, then people won’t be able to make movies anymore because there won’t be a business for it.”
The executive then talked about how the Paris Theater in Manhattan, the last single-screen theater in the city, was saved by the streamer (“It was about to become a Walgreens,” he claimed), a move that wasn’t designed to save “the theater business,” but rather “the theater experience.”
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