Netflix steps up their game

Published on Sep 4th, 2012
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Written by Leah Koerner
LeahKoerner@TheCinemaSource.com

There’s a new greenhorn gunslinger in town and though they don’t have the network channels shaking in their boots yet, they are definitely on the path towards doing so. We know this new kid in town as Netflix.

Netflix premiered its first original series in February, a comedy-drama about a New York gangster trying to start a new life in Norway called Lilyhammer. The show is Norwegian-American and had nearly a million subscribers; enough to make it viable for a second season.

With the success of Lilyhammer and looking to expand their horizons as a company, Netflix is also setting up to make two more original series: House Of Cards with David Fincher directing and Orange is the New Black, from the creator of Weeds Jenji Kohan. They are about a politician who grows increasingly corrupt and a wealthy Connecticut woman who finds herself in prison, respectively.

Since Netflix is only a baby industry, they’ve had trouble working with David Fincher. Set to make House Of Cards, Fincher has demanded the show’s funder (independent studio Media Rights Capital) for the show to have a higher budget. Netflix being a young industry did not anticipate a Hollywood auteur’s displeasure with the budget, and he has threatened to leave the project. If David Fincher demanded a higher budget for any movie he was making to the funding studio, they’d already have gotten their wallets out before he even finished his sentence.

Netflix is great, but everyone who has it knows not only that they don’t have nearly enough streaming movies and shows, Netflix also isn’t superbly organized. If they don’t feature a foreign language in their Foreign Language section, you may be SOL or have to page through an uncategorizable smorgasboard of movies, television shows, and miniseries. For example, Hindi is the fourth most spoken language on Earth. Netflix has movies and TV shows in Hindi, but you can’t separate them by genre.

We know that Netflix is here to stay, and that they’re getting bigger and bigger by every new subscriber. It’s only a matter of time until Netflix is caught up with other major television networks.

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