My guess is that over the next 5 years Netflix will be acquired by another platform or studio. It’s the youngest and a stand alone, so it’s the odd man out when compared to Hulu w/Disney or Amazon w/a massive services company as the breadwinner. It’s not established as a producer like HBO, either.
Netflix knew this was coming, which is why they’ve invested so much in creating their own brands and licensing established IPs already. They needed a big number of projects to stand on their own and establish themselves as a studio apart from everyone else, because once streaming became the new normal all the legacy studios started keeping their own (or at least best) content. Netflix knew this and tried to adapt, but it’s almost impossible to pivot from zero native content to a full fledged studio. Even having big hits like Stranger Things and Bridgerton don’t do enough fast enough to cement the company long term. You need like 20 of those every year to keep up with Disney’s absurd backlog, and you need it in perpetuity. Meanwhile Amazon can literally light money on fire for 20 years and still be standing because Prime is a minuscule subset of their revenue (if it even makes them a dime at this point).
Netflix either needs to scale down dramatically and become rich and niche (in which case they’ll be bought) or merge/be acquired by someone else who has that catalogue already. The “get woke go broke” argument may be a supplementary cause of their decline, it’s certainly hastened the downfall of other media companies, but this outcome was already baked in the cake.
A similar thing will hit game studios who don’t have any native IPs, but make content for dozens of games for other studios. A global recession hits and suddenly they are cost prohibitive, their labor gets resourced to cheaper markets, and because they don’t actually make a product of their own they lose most of their clients. Netflix saw this coming and couldn’t course correct before they hit the iceberg.
www.bloomberg.com
