Why are the most expensive Netflix movies also the worst?

The Guardian

17-03-2025

The full effect of Netflix on the film industry, positive or (more likely) negative, will be reverberating for years to come. But in the short term, they've made some undeniably great movies, mostly through the strategy of giving money to great directors and appearing to let them do whatever they want (and supplementing those by acquiring already-great movies from film festivals). That's how you wind up with The Irishman, Marriage Story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Hit Man, Roma, The Power of the Dog, Da 5 Bloods, Rebel Ridge and The Killer, among others.
It's a lineup that smokes most of the major studios, which was presumably the idea: undercut the competition by stealing the film-makers they established and giving them the world. That particular era of risk-taking may be over for the growth-obsessed company, but they've still got plenty of capital to spend, which means more big Netflix movies like The Electric State, a $300m sci-fi adventure starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown that just dropped on the service. Netflix wants to engineer blockbuster spectacles to compete with the biggest movies Hollywood has to offer, and in a feat perhaps even more amazing than securing Noah Baumbach a big budget for White Noise, or improving Adam Sandler's later-period batting average, they have yet to make one that's actually good.
Of course, by traditional terms, they haven't made a blockbuster at all; the word refers to lines around the block, and Netflix only respects the virtual queue. Even then, they seem to prefer an impulse pressing of play to any kind of real organizational structure. But in more contemporary accounting – that is, whatever Netflix itself sees fit to provide – Netflix originals like Red Notice, The Adam Project and The Gray Man (from the Electric State directors Joe and Anthony Russo) have successfully attracted a large number of eyeballs, ranking among their all-time top 10. (The metrics are still apples-to-oranges with normal box office numbers, but it's fair to say the most-watched movies on a globally popular streaming service were pretty well-circulated, even if not every viewer finished watching them.)
So Netflix can woo terrific film-makers, and they can draw big audiences. How is it, then, that they have yet to make a truly excellent blockbuster-style entertainment that does both at once? Some of these 'big' Netflix movies may have their fans, but could anyone argue with a straight face that something like Bright, Atlas or Red Notice is playing on the same level as Jurassic Park, The Avengers, Avatar, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or even the average James Bond adventure? Hell, is 6 Underground anyone's favorite Michael Bay movie?
Maybe it is; that Bay project at least felt like an accurate distillation of the film-maker's sensibilities, no matter how poisonous. It's also the exception that proves the rule: in general, marquee film-makers aren't coming to Netflix for carte blanche to make rollercoaster entertainment that any studio would greenlight. (That's part of what made 6 Underground so hilariously galling: the idea that it was a reaction to anyone ever having told Bay 'no.') Directors like Scorsese, Spike Lee, David Fincher, and Jane Campion are (or were) attracted by the freedom from exactly that sort of dumb-fun mandate.
Still, that doesn't exactly explain a movie like The Electric State, given that it was made by the Russos, the guys behind Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, two of the biggest blockbusters of all time. Even if the true authorship of those movies should be ascribed to Marvel Studios in general, rather than the film-makers in particular, the Russos should have exactly the right experience navigating a corporate environment to produce a crowd-pleasing spectacle with some semblance of human interest. Yet that's precisely what The Electric State, in all of its pseudo-Spielbergian team-ups between adorable robots and broken-family humans blathering about human connection, absolutely lacks: a sense that it was made with anything resembling a genuine point of view beyond 'this'll play with the rubes'. A devoted auteurist might be able to excavate some deeper thematic connection between Russo Netflix projects like The Gray Man and The Electric State, but to do so, they would have to get past their more obvious commonalties, like grayish-haze low-contrast visuals and career-worst performances from well-liked stars. Truly, even the house-style Marvel movies have more going on.
Sometimes, the disposability of Netflix mockbusters might seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy: how can movies that are unceremoniously dropped on to home menus at 3am, attracting living-room indifference that fails to even sink to the level of a hate-watch, really get a fair shake next to even a middling movie-theater experience? Yet I can say from experience that these movies still feel off on the big screen, because that's actually how I saw Red Notice, 6 Underground, The Gray Man and The Electric State, among others. Sometimes they're screened for press this way, but all of those also played limited, barely promoted theatrical runs a week before their Netflix debut, and I dutifully paid for tickets to all of them.
While certain sequences from all of them have a bit more grandeur projected on a bigger canvas, and most do benefit from the initial charge of seeing major stars in their natural habitat, all of these movies do a quick real-time fade as they're playing, whether at 60 in or 60 ft. Electric State is a particularly dull watch; whenever the camera isn't catching the special-effects marvels of its robot characters (which, for all the movie's Amblin aspirations, land somewhere between the Transformers and the imaginary-friend denizens of IF), it becomes easy to notice how drably inexpressive the movie's actual settings are. The Netflix blockbuster is rarely based on ultra-popular pre-existing franchises – Electric State is from an acclaimed but not franchised graphic novel; The Gray Man and Red Notice are, gulp, writer-director originals – yet its echo-chamber effects feel like the work of a world where the only reference point is other mainstream junk. The directors come across like a version of Quentin Tarantino that only ever watched The Goonies and bits of Star Wars, even when they're making stuff attempting to knock off Hitchcock capers or Bond-style action.
This problem isn't a Netflix exclusive. There are plenty of genuine theatrical releases with a similar level of huckster-y chintz. Real Steel, another robots-have-heart picture, directed by The Adam Project's Shawn Levy, comes to mind, and Red Notice's Dwayne Johnson is no stranger to mockbuster aesthetics with movies like Skyscraper. It is strange, though, that all of this Netflix spending has never yielded, say, an intermittently brilliant indulgence like Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger or the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending. The streamer is far better at producing mid-level genre pictures like Carry-On or the Extraction series, the kind of meat-and-potatoes thrillers traditional studios have largely abandoned. Maybe that's because at-home viewings have, over the course of a century of film, become part of those movies' DNA, whether through TMC, TNT, or now free streamers like Tubi.
Blockbusters, on the other hand, have always been deceptively difficult to replicate; on some level, most of them seek some kind of overwhelming sensation, whether it's thrills, big laughs, melodrama, spectacular visuals or some combination; these things can be faked or strung along (plenty of middling mega-movies have been big hits), but the presentation is part of that fakery, which in turn can be part of the fun. A well-crafted one can sweep you up in the moment even if what they're doing isn't all that clever or insightful and leaves you with empty calories; JJ Abrams owes his whole career to this phenomenon. The Netflix auteur movies, meanwhile, are made with the confidence that they will transcend their humble smaller screens (or maybe the serene knowledge that at least they'll be shown at a lot of festivals before they make it to streaming). The most striking aspect of their mockbuster cousins is how they feel infused with the knowledge that this avenue is closed to them; it's almost astonishing how inept they are at faking otherwise. Movies like The Electric State can throw around millions of dollars, big stars and cutting-edge effects, but they just can't shake the bone-deep knowledge that they're content first.