Netflix Scraps Two Completed Films, Continuing Awful Industry Trend
Not so long ago, Netflix had the reputation for saving movies and TV shows. As the biggest streamer, Netflix was able to give closure to fans of "Arrested Development," "Lucifer," "Gilmore Girls," "Designated Survivor," and even "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" when their original networks couldn't (or wouldn't) bring those shows in for a landing.
On the movie side, Netflix famously took "The Cloverfield Paradox" off of Paramount's hands and they shocked the world by adding it to their service right after the film was announced via a Super Bowl trailer.
Those days might be long gone, though, as The Hollywood Reporter has gotten wind that Netflix is axing two of its original movies: "The Inheritance" and "House/Wife." Even in their glory days, Netflix was known to cancel their regular series without explanation or closure, so they've always had a foot in that typical Hollywood machine world, but now that Netflix is abandoning its own original movies, who's gonna be there to step up?
This comes on the heels of other streamers tightening the belt as the gold rush of streaming seems to be slowing down to a trickle. We all know about HBO Max unceremoniously shelving "Batgirl" and erasing even released shows from their platform.
Netflix was supposed to be the steady rock of streamers and now they're jettisoning their original content instead of releasing it, too.
There is still hope for these two movies to find a home elsewhere
Both of the movies that Netflix is dumping are genre pictures, which you'd think would be their bread and butter since it's the streaming service that owes much of its industry power to "Stranger Things." One is called "The Inheritance," directed by Alejandro Brugues ("Nightmare Cinema") and starring Bob Gunton ("The Shawshank Redemption") as the aging patriarch of a wealthy family who fears someone (or something) is coming to kill him, so he brings in his spoiled children and makes it clear that if he dies, they get no inheritance.
"House/Wife" is a killer AI story starring Alice Braga about a mother who spends her time recovering from a traumatic accident in a smart home run by a prototype AI, and in the era of "M3GAN," you just know that's not good news.
THR reports that the move comes when Netflix is looking to cut down on their production spend, even though their last quarter was massive, gaining them over 7 million new subscribers. The head-scratcher is that both films are already completed, so I guess Netflix is looking to recoup some of its investment by selling them off? We do know that those movies are being shopped around, but again it feels like a completely backward move for Netflix, which used to be the studio that would buy their content from nervous studios trying to cut costs.
We don't know what's going on over at Netflix, but at the very least they're not pulling the Warner Bros/HBO Max move of just straight-up disappearing their completed movies for tax write-off purposes. "The Inheritance" and "House/Wife" could very well end up on other streamers, or, hilariously, picked up by movie studios now that the box office is back up to pre-pandemic attendance.
Still, bad form, Netflix. Please don't make a habit out of this.