Netflix recently announced a price increase for subscribers, news that wasn’t particularly well-received. (Price increases often aren’t, obviously, but hey, inflation is a thing, if you’re feeling charitable.)
Along with the monthly fee increase, Netflix has announced their intentions to further expand their original film production. They released eight films in the third quarter of 2016, so their current production isn’t exactly limited.
However, according to this piece from Variety, Netflix is going to be thinking a lot bigger in 2018:
Netflix expects to release around 80 original films next year, as it looks to hit the kind of scale in movies that it’s achieved on the TV side, according to chief content officer Ted Sarandos.
“They range anywhere from the million-dollar Sundance hit, all the way up to something on a much larger scale,” like Will Smith-starrer “Bright,” Sarandos said in an investors’ interview Monday about Netflix’s third-quarter 2017 results.
80 films! That’s a lot, although as Sarandos notes, they’re not all going to be big-budget affairs:
“Bright,” a cop action-thriller movie directed by David Ayer, had a reported production price tag of $90 million. It’s set to debut on Netflix worldwide on Dec. 22. Sarandos also cited as a forthcoming big-budget picture Martin Scorsese’s gangster movie “The Irishman,” starring Robert DeNiro, slated to be released on Netflix in early 2019. “The Irishman” has a budget of more $100 million.
Sarandos said with the release of “Bright” — a “big-budget, event movie” — “I think people will start seeing the potential for this original movie initiative, that it could be done on the enormous scale we have on the television side.”
