Quad Dog said:
Quote:
Look at The Irishman. Widely critically acclaimed and nominated for several Oscars IIRC, but it had a $160 million budget and generated maybe 120-150 million viewership hours. Prestigious, but not really money well spent unless Netflix sees something in viewership data that says it boosted viewership elsewhere.
If we assume each of those estimated 120-150 million viewership hours was smeone buying a month of membership. Using a three hour movie, and a minimum of a month of subscription.
150,000,000 viewership hours / 3 hour movie = 50,000,000 monthly memberships * $15 membership = $750 million or 4 times the budget. I'd take that deal if I were Netflix.
Except Netflix didn't add 50 million viewers with The Irishman. The overwhelmingly vast majority of the viewers already had subscriptions and would have paid them regardless, so Netflix could have theoretically saved $160 million if it never existed. The question is how much retention did it garner and how many viewers it added. It needed to either retain or add about 2 million accounts for 6 months each just to break even (or in any way achieve 12 million subscriber months). That sounds small compared to Netflix's 220 million subscriber base, but it is not an insignificant amount. It's basically a quarterly add. I highly doubt that it attained that on its own.
Netflix is well saturated in the US, so foreign content is likely to get more new subscribers, while English and particularly US based content is likely to keep subscribers. That's why Netflix has been expanding foreign content for the last few years. The Irishman is a one time watch that isn't going to keep someone for six months, and it's likely not bringing in foreign or domestic subscribers. Only Netflix knows the real impact because they have the subscriber breakdown and history, but I kind of doubt it was worth what they ultimately spent on a viewership hour/budget $ basis.
What keeps viewers is having a wide breadth of content or rewatachable content (reruns, kids' shows) to fill viewership hours per month. That means cheap shows and movies with big names that create wide ranging content for all audiences. The Irishman doesn't really fit that because it's more of an artistic movie than a consumption movie. Red Notice had an even bigger budget, but it also generated 330 million viewer hours and will likely get a lot of rewatches because it's fun and feature length. Rewatching the Irishman is like rewatching Titanic or The Godfather. People don't do it for movie night. Ultimately, Red Notice got twice the bang for the buck in terms of viewership hours, even though it's got a 6.3 IMDB rating and like 36% on Rotten Tomatoes. Considering it's half the length, that means it reached 4x the viewers, too. While The Irishman may have prestige, it doesn't exactly provide a great return considering it's huge budget yet minimal impact in terms of metrics.