Hacker Cinema
Mudbound
2017 · Film · 135 min
Directed by Dee Rees
In the post–World War II South, two families are pitted against a barbaric social hierarchy and an unrelenting landscape as they simultaneously fight the battle at home and the battle abroad.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
Right, and I am differentiating films from TV/shows because they're completely different markets.
However, with respect to Icarus, it was not produced by Netflix; only distributed by it. Hollywood studios also bid on the distribution rights but Netfix simply outbid them. (Per reports, it was the most ever paid for a documentary.) Similarly, both Beasts of No Nation and Mudbound, the only two well-regarded films in Netflix' lineup, were both produced by indie studios. Netflix simply outbid Hollywood studios for the distribution rights. Netflix has never actually made a good movie on its own. (Though in Netflix' defense on my thesis about the crap quality of their movies, Cloverfield Paradox was a Paramount production; Paramount got the better end of the deal.)
My experience is definitely different from normal because I live in Tinseltown a few blocks from one of the theaters where they hold movie premieres and from an Alamo Drafthouse, but I could never see Netflix replacing Hollywood.
The business models are fundamentally different. All Netflix cares about is eyeballs and giving customers the barest reason to continue subscribing. This means that they focus on quantity over quality, as evidenced by their last 3 years of films: each worse than the one released the week before it, with extremely rare exceptions like Beasts of No Nation and Mudbound. (It's curious that their films are so horrifically bad when their TV series are generally watchable, though Lost In Space and the recent seasons of OitNB and HoC suggest that the malaise affecting their film department has spread to the show department.)
Hollywood, for all the moaning about sequilitis and mass-market crap, at least makes crap that's good enough to draw people out of their homes, drive a few miles, and plop down a few dozen dollars for seats and maybe food. There's a strong incentive to maintain at least a minimum baseline of quality and a stronger incentive to make a commercially viable movie.
Think about the films people will remember from the last decade: you won't find any Netflix films among them. But the cultural significance of films like La La Land, Star Wars, even the the Fast and the Furious franchise will outlive us all.
Mudbound - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/16/mudbound-review-powerful-tale-from-jim-crow-america-has-real-sinew - is a very good film about poverty, among other things. It doesn't smack you in the face and say "I'M A FILM ABOUT POVERTY", which seems to be the Guardian writer's requirement for inclusion on his list, but it is.