Netflix Keeps Finding Ways to Steal Hollywood’s Spotlight

Is it a coincidence that you can’t stream the 1978 classic Boys from Brazil on Netflix right now? 

The streaming giant slightly missed Wall Street’s earnings targets for its third quarter, which it chalked up on Tuesday to an unexpected expense over a tax dispute with Brazilian authorities. Otherwise, the results were pretty rosy: Revenue jumped 17% year-over-year, to $11.5 billion, and net income rose 8%, to $2.5 billion. Meanwhile, the Hollywood disruptor continues to find new ways to rattle Tinseltown.

Talking Heads

Shares of Netflix sank as much as 7% in after-hours trading on Tuesday, following the somewhat disappointing after-the-bell earnings call. That continues a downward trend that began after shares reached an all-time high on June 30. Since then, the company has found itself in Elon Musk’s culture war crosshairs, which weighed on the stock, and shareholders have raised concerns that the platform is failing to juice its user-engagement metrics.

Netflix seems to have the engagement question top of mind. Last week, the company announced a new partnership with Spotify (where co-CEO Ted Sarandos just so happens to be a board member) to air a slew of popular video podcasts on its streaming service. It was a direct shot at YouTube, Netflix’s biggest competitor in its war for TV time:

• According to Nielsen data, YouTube accounted for just over 12% of all TV time in the US in September, the most of any platform, while runner-up Netflix accounted for just over 8%. Meanwhile, in a year-end blog post, YouTube reported that viewers watched more than 400 million hours of video podcasts on their TVs per month in 2024.
• In other words, video podcasts have become the type of cheap, reliable talking-head content that used to eat up daytime linear TV schedules, which makes the medium a potential growth area for the engagement-hungry Netflix. The Spotify deal will bring the video feeds of popular Spotify Studios podcasts such as “The Bill Simmons Podcast,” “The Rewatchables,” and “The Ringer Fantasy Football Show” to Netflix, while removing their video feeds from YouTube.

It’s Easy As A-M-C: Netflix also scored a deal this month with longtime enemy AMC Theaters, which has agreed to play Netflix’s ultra-popular animated film KPop: Demon Hunters when it’s re-released for a limited theatrical run at the end of the month. The children’s musical became a smash hit when it debuted on Netflix on June 20 and went on to surprise box office success when Netflix gave it a limited theatrical release in August (AMC declined to screen the film at that time). If Netflix is increasingly interested in the power of the box office, it may have a big opportunity on its hands. 

On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery, which recently rebuffed an offer from David Ellison’s new-look Paramount, announced it is officially open to a sale and that there are multiple interested parties. Is one of them Netflix? During an interview at the Bloomberg Screentime Conference earlier this month, co-CEO Greg Peters implied the company wasn’t interested, citing Netflix’s history as “builders rather than buyers” and noting big media mergers “don’t have an amazing track record.” Still, sources told CNBC that Netflix would be remiss to let a competitor snap up WBD at a low price.