According to an article from The New York Post, Netflix now wants to produce better films and has put a stop to certain projects, including Aurora, the sci-fi feature film that Kathryn Bigelow was to direct.
Change of course on the Netflix side. With the arrival on April 1 of a new head of the “films” department, the American giant seems to be opting for a new strategy regarding the production of its feature films. In any case, this is what we learn in this article from New York Times which offers very interesting insight into the changes that have begun over the last few weeks.
No more small privileges
When Netflix began producing its own films, the American giant wanted to stand out from its competitors by offering its talents total creative freedom and fairly substantial budgets. The platform did not hesitate to spend money to have in its stable great directors like Martin Scorsese and Alfonso Cuarón, but also bankable actors like Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson.
If until recently this formula worked, times seem to have changed. In the NYT article, we learn that Netflix “no longer wants to make blockbusters with big talents like The Gray Man And Red Notice” (which are among the most viewed on the platform) but rather films from “better quality, cheaper and less frequent”.
The talent drain
This announcement is reassuring even if we wait to see the result with our own eyes. But this change of direction also pushed Netflix to backpedal on certain projects. We thus learn that Kathryn Bigelow’s next film, which was announced with great fanfare two years ago, will no longer be made.
The Oscar-winning director for Minesweepers, who is becoming increasingly rare, was to direct Aurora, the adaptation of the SF novel by David Koepp. The latter plunged us into an apocalyptic world after a solar storm knocked out most of the electrical networks. A divorced mother who must protect her son then becomes closer to her brother who is a rich CEO of Silicon Valley who built a luxurious bunker in the desert to deal with such a catastrophe…
Kathryn Bigelow left the project a few months ago, without knowing why, and seems to have made the same decision as other directors who found their happiness elsewhere, like Scorsese who collaborated with Apple for Killers of the Flower Moon, (which promised a cinema release then on its streaming platform).
Does this mean the end of the collaboration between Netflix and the big Hollywood names? Nothing is less sure. If some, like Guillermo Del Toro, continue to work with the American giant, the cut in budgets and more drastic choices in projects should not please everyone…
