THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
Why are these men so happy?
When Netflix Masters of the Universe Reed Hastings, Ted Sarandos and Spencer Neumann released their quarterly investors video interview two hours after their quarterly results were released, they came off as giddy. (The images are from the first appearance of each man yesterday.) The stock had already dropped 20%.
They argued, in their digital bubble, that the quarter was pretty good. Reed Hastings scoffed at any worries about missing their sub growth projection for the quarter, “8.3 million versus 8.5 million, I mean…”
I can’t argue with that. Except that in the years past, had they been over projection by .2 million, instead of under, Wall St would reward the stock handsomely.
What happened yesterday and continues today is that the facts of perspective that some of us have been writing about for years now came home to roost on the news of a very normal-looking Netflix quarter.
Last quarter announcement, Q3 on Oct 19, 2021, the stock dropped 14 points the next day from $539 to $525. That was only a 2% drop. And then, 10 days later, the stock was up 8%, close to its all-time high at $690 a share.
That is the history of this stock. Q3 was not as solid as Q4. But after a small dip, the bulls kept talking it up and buying it up.
Today, after the nearly instant stop of 20% yesterday after market, we didn’t see people buying that huge dip. More people got out. Depending on what moment on Friday, January 21 that this newsletter is published, Netflix’s stock will be down somewhere between 20% and 25% from January 20.
But it’s worse than that.
The stock closed at 691 on November 17, 2021. It’s dropped 43% since then.
So… why?
I have believed that Netflix is a strong company with a solid future for a little longer than I have thought that the stock price was out of control. Listening to much of the analysis today, I am hearing arguments I have been making for a long time. And some that reach beyond what I would consider reasonable. No time to become Chicken Little: Streaming Screamer.
All of a sudden, the stock market seems to be rethinking the entire take on streaming.
Well… yeah. The bubble of the Wall Street fantasy that spending 70% of your total revenue on content is a good business model for a mature company carrying a load of debt – and that you should keep growing that spend – seems to have burst.
But the idea that you need to spend more and more on original content to build a successful streamer is still floating out there. Disney added an insane $8 billion to their annual content budget a few months ago and they are still getting kicked by the market today. It’s not enough for some people.
Netflix got hoisted on its own hype this week. How could the mind-numbing success of Squid Game and the terrible but well-viewed Red Notice and Don’t Look Up not generate a suprising uptick this quarter? If they can’t do it, nobody can!!!
The market is so desperate for a straight answer from Netflix that they took this quote from Reed Hastings to be an acknowledgement of the competition being an issue: “There’s more competition than there’s ever been. But we’ve had Hulu and Amazon for 14 years. So it doesn’t feel like any qualitative change there.”
How big is the worldwide streaming sub market? Not what promoters of Netflix have suggested. “Netflix is at 222 million worldwide subs and there is 3x or 4x that available even without China” was also a load of poop and the scent hit the market yesterday.
Wall Street has had a crazy crush on Netflix. And not without reason. Netflix has been the handsome, wealthy, powerful quarterback. No matter what has happened, they have found a way to win.
But now, the honeymoon phase is over as every honeymoon ends. Wall Street is wondering whether they want to spend the rest of their lives waiting for “him” to come home from his drinking nights with the boys, picking up his underwear off the floor, taking him to the doctors office to have the pain eased from what will be permanent physical pains, etc. They look around and they see the other star players to whom they might leap from their new perspective… the idea of trading off the one they have to jump to the side of another one that will have most of the same issues… not so exciting.
Netflix is a terrific $200 billion company. The stock price has dropped almost low enough to reflect that.
The concerns that Wall Street is having this week are completely reasonable, in that perspective.
What is not reasonable is the idea that the streaming business sucks and everyone is going to fall over the edge of the cliff now. Streaming is the future of television. There is zero question. It’s here and its going to keep eating the world.
But I don’t trust Wall Street to keep perspective and not to start crushing on Netflix again. One sign of a revived crush energy would be more otherwise-smart people pushing the irrational argument that Netflix is a tech company. It hasn’t been that for years. But people do love to make the argument.
How things work out, over the next couple of weeks, Netflix will have a new perspective. But this is not only a Netflix issue. It is an issue for the entire film/tv industry. Bob Chapek has torn Disney up under the premise that streaming is everything (a wild exaggeration… and not). How David Zaslav relaunches WBDisco will surely be influenced by where the matket and the world perceive expectations for the next 5 years of streaming. Choices by Comcast certainly are up in the air again. How the smaller players are valued will be changed by the light that Netflix brings or does not.
Weirdly, what we see, in part, is the story coming steadily back to the idea that what has been seen as legacy or linear can be pushed in whole onto the internet without as much disruption as has seemed to be inevitable in the last couple years. I think that is a who different kind of overreach.
But the story Netflix told this week is, in the Book of Streaming, in its first few chapters, not close to the Big Reveal yet. The wild ride continues.
Until tomorrow…
-30-
May 1, 2022
"Netflix, the great disrupter whose algorithms and direct-to-consumer platform have forced powerful media incumbents to rethink their economic models, now seems to need a big strategy change itself. It got me thinking about the simple idea that my film and TV production company Blumhouse is built on: If you give artists a lot of creative freedom and a little money upfront but a big stake in the movie’s or TV show’s commercial success, more often than not the result will be both commercial (the filmmakers are incentivized to make films that will resonate with audiences) and artistically interesting (creative freedom!). This approach has yielded movies as varied as Get Out (made for $4.5 million, with worldwide box office receipts of more than $250 million), Whiplash (made for $3.3 million, winner of three Academy Awards), The Invisible Man (made for $7 million, earned more than $140 million) and Paranormal Activity (made for $15,000, grossed more than $190 million).From the beginning, the most important strategy I used to persuade artists to work with me was to make radically transparent deals: We usually paid the artists (“participants” in Hollywood lingo) the absolute minimum allowable by union contracts upfront, with the promise of healthy bonuses based on actual box office results—instead of the opaque 'percentage points' that artists are usually offered. Anyone can see box office results immediately, so creators don’t quarrel with the payouts. In fact, when it comes time for an artist to collect a bonus based on box office receipts, I email a video clip of myself dropping the check off at FedEx to the recipient."
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| December 4, 2019
Clear as mud. Discounting the many typos, this is woeful writing. Please read EB White or William Zinsser and take it to heart.
2022 weekend 3 $ 42M
2018 weekend: 3 $104M
Over 550 scripted TV shows filming last year, Netflix numbers inflation. Theatrical shrunk.
From the outside looking in, people are overpaid everywhere. From the outside looking in, money has been thrown at content everywhere. When stars are as common as litter, is anyone a star?
Hollywood isn’t worth its valuations. It never has been. People are stupid about glamour. If they aren’t stupid about Netflix, they will be stupid about something else. And the shows will go on.
All of the possible Oscar BP candidates, all of them, up to and including Dune, made about 1% of last year’s itty bitty total theatrical box office. Will this year’s Oscars show be over or under last year’s 9 million?
This is just my idea…
If “Spider Man 3: No Way Home,” “Dune” and “House of Gucci” all got large numbers of nominations, would the Oscar tv show ratings go up, precisely because the Oscar voters nominated these three movies? They are the biggest box office movies that have been mentioned, in articles I have read, as having a chance at the nominations.
McKellen performed with the Scissors Sisters. he shows up after about 3-1/2 minutes…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfkKmncw3rc
he did a recording with them, too.
Excellent.
Deja vu from 20 years ago after the AOL/Time-Warner merger was announced. Disney stock like now, was “punished” for not meeting earnings forecasts and what-not. But even though Time-Warner had debt, it was rewarded for this and the stock had big swings that at the low end was still a high. Of course once the merger took place, the new stock took a hit.
And we know how that ended up!