Ever since Bela Bajaria, Netflix's Chief Content Officer, was ousted a few weeks ago, closely followed by her right-hand man Dan Lin, head of films, every streaming commentator has been offering their advice on how to help Netflix "reinvent itself" or "find a new lease on life." And all this time, I've been holding myself back from responding to every article that recycles one, two, or three of the ideas that keep coming back, on a loop, for weeks now, if not for as long as Netflix has been Netflix.

So I'll take them one at a time, and try to debunk them on one specific ground: that of "engagement." It's what lies at the heart of Netflix's troubles these past few weeks, ever since an analysis by Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg added up the viewing hours in Netflix's Engagement Reports to conclude that engagement was growing by just 2%. That's the focal point of all its current woes, reinforced last week by an article noting that subscribers were opening the app less often and spending less time on it. None of the three clichés that follow will answer any of these signals.

Let's start with the first point that always comes up, namely that Netflix should refocus on "quality" and drop "quantity," as if the two couldn't go together. That's exactly what they've done in recent years, with a fairly significant pullback in the number of films and series produced in the United States in particular but has perceived quality gone up as a result?

Here I'll focus on a small sub-category of programming that I find fairly telling, namely Netflix's US films. To quantify their "quality," I used Rotten Tomatoes, which has two scores — one reserved for critics and one reserved for audiences. What we find is that since 2021, the number of Netflix US films has dropped drastically without the quality perceived by either critics or audiences rising, or if it has, then only very marginally.

From 63 films in 2021, we're now down to 25 this year, though that should normally climb above 30 with the year-end line-up. But producing fewer hasn't necessarily raised overall quality, and even if it's been edging up slightly for the past two years, it's still far below the level of the 2021 line-up.

If we take the list of Netflix's 20 most-watched films over their first 91 days along with their critical and audience reception, we see that the critics' score seems to matter less than the audience score.

Admittedly, KPop Demon Hunters delighted critics and audiences alike, but the number 2 on the list, Red Notice, was a far bigger hit with audiences (92% favorable!) than with the press, and that explains its very high number of views, combined with the fact that it's a big-budget action film starring well-known names. The average critics' score across this Top 20 is 60/100, while the average audience score is 68/100, which means that if "quality" matters for viewership, it's the quality perceived by audiences more than the quality perceived by critics. It's also why Netflix likes to say that it values thumbs-up on its service, because in the end, it's the audience that watches the films, and their opinion matters more.

If I look only at the films released this year, the one that was best received by critics is Color Book but it's also the one that was watched the least (and by a wide margin) on the service over its first 14 days.

So there's no obvious correlation between critical reception, audience reception, and viewership. It's always better to have all three, but make no mistake: in a world where Netflix seems to be judged on its overall "engagement," and despite its promises to make "better films and series," of the three columns in the chart above, the one that matters most is the third, not the first. And there's no link between the two.

We've been hearing this argument for ages now, and it rests on two notions:

Now, I'll start with point number 2 because it's the easiest to debunk, and because I already wrote a very long analysis on the subject this year that you can read by clicking below:

Ted Sarandos echoed this a few weeks ago: the films that perform best on the service are originals, but with one exception he pointed out: family and animated films, which generate lots of views and re-watches. That's part of why Netflix will release the next Narnia, an animated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film, in theaters at the end of 2027, and likely KPop Demon Hunters 2 as well, because they're betting that these releases won't cannibalize streaming viewership too much.

The Top 20 most-watched streaming films in the US this year seems to bear him out: among the 8 theatrical films that make it up, 5 are animated, and the 3 live-action theatrical films post lower numbers than the originals, whether on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

That said, I'm willing to bet right here and now that Narnia or the animated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film won't make the all-time Top 10 after their first 91 days, because they'll have lost that freshness by the time they arrive on streaming. Even if Disney/Pixar animated films dominate the top spots in this year's ranking, they do so at levels far below the launches of brand-new Pixar originals, and once again, that seems so obvious that I can't believe we still have to reiterate that if KPop Demon Hunters 2 was released directly on streaming, it would rack up more views (and therefore more engagement) than if it landed on streaming 45 days after a theatrical run, however successful that run might have been.

Ted Sarandos also mentioned prestige films, which have likewise benefited from limited theatrical releases for years, but these typically generate few views on the service, so a limited theatrical release of this kind only cannibalizes engagement on the service at the margins.

Let's turn to the question of the revenue that such wide theatrical releases would bring Netflix, because that's also a very easy argument to debunk. The US box office is heading toward its biggest post-pandemic year, reaching $10 billion, meaning $5 billion that will end up in distributors' pockets. Even if Netflix were responsible for 100% of all movie tickets sold in the US this year, that would only raise its annual revenue by 10%. A nice deal, sure, but even by putting its entire annual line-up in theaters, Netflix will never pocket that much.

Over the first six months of the year, Universal reported $1.089 billion from the worldwide theatrical release of its films, Paramount $290 million, and Sony $180 million — a total of $1.5 billion for these three studios (the only ones that disclose their theatrical revenue). Over the same period, Netflix posted $24.8 billion in revenue and $8.6 billion in profit. So there's no magic money to be made at the box office, nothing that would fundamentally alter Netflix’s finances, all the more so because success there is highly volatile.

After a record year in 2025, Warner Bros Discovery's 2026 theatrical line-up is reportedly heading toward a cumulative loss of $800 million, according to a PageSix article. That's not necessarily the kind of headline Netflix would want to take to Wall Street. Netflix is a company that's allergic to the unpredictable, and there's nothing more unpredictable than a theatrical release, where a film can be judged a flop as early as the Friday morning of its opening.

The last point I wanted to address is weekly releases, because once again it's based on shows that post weak viewership compared to their first season. And so the miracle solution would be the weekly release, to shorten the wait between seasons relative to the binge model and boost viewership.

I've already come back to this exact subject in an analysis published earlier this year, which you can read here:

In short, it once again seems fairly logical to me that the binge release reduces erosion within a given season, since you just have to hit "play" to watch the next episode instead of waiting a week. But erosion between seasons could perhaps be reduced if the wait between the two were shorter, particularly for shows that are fairly middling. Here too, I wrote a very long analysis on the subject that you can read here:

There's bound to be erosion between episodes and between seasons, regardless of the release format. It's natural and logical. The binge release lets you hook everyone right away, but if the show isn't up to par, a greater or lesser share won't come back for the following season.

That's why American streamers make choices. Netflix is all-binge for its major US series, as is Peacock. Amazon Prime is only binge for the first season, before switching to weekly for subsequent seasons to capitalize on its most devoted fans (except in cases of an industrial disaster like Citadel). Disney has tried everything, between weekly primarily (though sometimes shortened to two or three episodes per week, as with Visionquest and season 3 of Percy Jackson) and binge this year (for WonderMan and season 2 of Chad Powers). Paramount+ also tested the binge format this year, while HBO Max and Apple TV remain fairly firmly in the weekly-release camp — without that significantly boosting their usage share in the Nielsen Gauge.

The fact that every service is experimenting and moving increasingly toward binge shows that the weekly release really isn't the cure-all or miracle solution for a service starved of engagement.

It's easy to say that other people's ideas don't work, but what's the solution in my view? Actually, the solution isn't mine, it's Reed Hastings', who appeared on a podcast last week with an answer I found perfect:

He's talking about making better series and better films (we've seen that's easier said than done) but above all about making more films and series. That's the real heart of the problem. Between 2021, when Netflix was announcing an American film a week, and now, when it's more like one or two a month at most, there's a world of difference and returning to the release volume of its biggest years is what would allow it to boost engagement. Not everything would be quality, but it would let Netflix test, innovate too (remember Kaleidoscope, the series you could watch in any order, or the film Choose Love, where you could pick the ending), and multiply its chances of landing a massive hit.

The engagement problem Netflix is going through is the same one Disney+ is facing, a service that has also cut back on original productions. So the solution is to release more films and series, American ones, I mean, with big stars.

Sure, doing that is expensive. But it's less expensive than watching your market cap lose $250 billion in a single year… Except that's exactly what happened. The 2022 correction was triggered by the first net subscriber loss in Netflix's history (200,000 lost in the first quarter, largely attributable to the withdrawal from Russia), but it was set up by months of market nervousness over the content-spend-to-revenue-growth ratio.

What's interesting is the overreaction that followed. Netflix didn't simply trim its spending, it cut to the bone. From 63 US films in 2021, we're down to 23 in 2026 so far. From an American film a week, we've gone to one or two a month. The question no one is asking is this: at what point did this reduction become a problem in itself? The answer is now. When you have 325 million subscribers and soon close to a billion users, one big US series and one big US film a month are no longer enough. Fewer releases means fewer reasons to open the app every day and every week. Fewer releases means fewer chances of landing a hit. Fewer releases means, mathematically, fewer viewing hours in this year and the next ones, the factor Netflix is being judged on right now.

The paradox is that the solution of doing more is exactly what Netflix was doing before the 2022 correction. And it was that correction that ushered in the motto "less but better." Reed Hastings, who no longer runs the day-to-day, can afford to say that now "Netflix needs to do more and better." The strategic question Netflix has to settle is this: at what level of content spending will the market accept slower growth? Because the alternative (changing nothing and watching engagement stagnate at +2%) will end up posing the very same question to Wall Street, but without the answer of volume to meet it.

On se retrouve dans quelques jours pour l’étude des derniers chiffres du streaming dans le monde !

Si vous avez aimé ce numéro de Netflix & Chiffres, pourquoi ne pas partager cette newsletter à quelqu’un que cela pourrait aussi intéresser ? Et si vous avez reçu cette newsletter de la part de quelqu’un d’autre et que vous souhaitez vous abonner gratuitement, c’est ici que ça se passe.

Vous pouvez me retrouver ici :