Oct 16, 2018 7:00 AM

Netflix May Not Win Best Picture, but We’ll Win Better Movies

After pushes into sci-fi and rom-coms, the streaming titan is throwing its considerable weight behind a spate of auteur-driven dramas.

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In early 2015, Netflix made one of the most dramatic deals in the company’s career, announcing it had paid close to $12 million for Beasts of No Nation, a grim war tale starring Idris Elba. By then, the streaming service had already found Emmy success with original series like House of Cards, and had even earned a couple of Academy Award nominations for its documentaries. But with Beasts of No Nation--which the company also released theatrically--Netflix was making a brazen play for a Best Actor nod, or possibly a spot in the Best Picture race. Either would have been a once-unthinkable achievement for an outfit that had started out renting Blade DVDs for four bucks a pop.

Yet despite solid reviews and some Golden Globes recognition for Elba, Beasts never wound up in the Oscar derby. Instead, Netflix’s splashy foray into the prestige-movie arena felt perpetually buffering. It didn’t help that theater-owners, resentful of the service’s encorachment on their terrain, pushed back against Beasts: The movie played on barely thirty screens, and was out of theaters within weeks. Netflix claimed the film performed well with at-home audiences, but the lack of Academy traction stymied the service’s hopes to be a contender.

More than three years later, Netflix has assembled its most audacious dramatic feature line-up yet--an assortment that, even if it doesn’t sway Oscar voters, will at least win over discerning film fans. It’s anchored by Roma, the forthcoming early-1970s tale directed by Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning force-of-nature behind Gravity and Children of Men. Scheduled for release in December, Roma is already a critical hit--the best-reviewed Netflix movie ever, having won over critics at several high-profile festival screenings this fall. The company hasn’t revealed Roma’s theatrical-release strategy yet, but Cuarón’s film will almost certainly open on more screens--and for a much longer stretch--than earlier Netflix efforts like Beasts or last year’s quadruple Oscar nominee Mudbound. And the streamer’s recent hiring of long-time campaign strategist Lisa Taback makes it clear the company intends to push hard for a Best Picture nomination--a feat competitor Amazon managed with 2016’s Manchester By the Sea.

But Roma is merely the most high-profile endeavor in a year that’s seen Netflix pursue a genre the major studios--and even a few indies--have quietly abandoned: The grown-up, auteur-driven drama. In the past few weeks, it’s released 22 July, a harrowing account of the 2011 Norway attacks, from Captain Phillips‘ Paul Greengrass; The Land of Steady Habits, a thoughtful family-in-crisis tale by veteran filmmaker Nicole Holofcener; Hold the Dark, an Alaska-set thriller directed by Green Room’s Jeremy Saulnier; and Private Life, a comedy-drama about a middle-aged couple trying to get pregnant, from The Savages’ writer-director Tamara Jenkins. They’ll be followed not only by Roma, but also November’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a western-set anthology by the Coen Brothers that started out as a TV series before being edited as a feature film.

All of these movies are being given theatrical runs of varying sizes--a strategy that serves as a lure for filmmakers, who want fans to at least have a chance to see their work on the big screen. They also signal that Netflix wants to differentiate these titles from the numerous, anonymous original movies that pop up on the service seemingly every week, often with little in the way of promotion or pre-release hype. The company loves crowing about big-budget titles like Bright or The Cloverfield Paradox. But the majority of the company’s original-feature catalog--which is quickly approaching 200 titles--are quickly forgettable offerings that often fall under the same categories: There are the Sad-Looking Sundance Dramas; the Sci-Fi Flicks with Weirdly Bad Effects; and the Romantic Comedies Starring Exactly One Person You Have Heard Of. A few genuinely great films are hidden amid the menu, like the on-the-run caper Tramps. And in 2018, several titles broke through based on social-media love, like Set It Up or To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. But the company’s strategy of volume over vigilance has made for a lot of cruddy meh-flicks.

That’s changing, as Netflix’s prestige-lust is forcing the company to invest in writer-directors with deep creative cred and risky original ideas--the kinds of ideas the big studios seem too skittish to back nowadays. It’s hard to imagine any big outlet other than Netflix greenlighting Greengrass’ tough, star-free account of a massacre that killed dozens of young people without diluting its power. The admirably grim Hold the Dark, meanwhile, is a mystery that doesn’t easily answer some of its biggest questions; as a result, it feels uncompromised in the best way possible, having not been second-guessed by execs. And The Land of Steady Habits casts Ready Player One and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story baddie Ben Mendelsohn as a shifty, kinda shitty middle-aged jerk--one of his most surprising and satisfying roles in years, and not the kind he’d normally land in a big franchise movie.

That performance was made possible in no small part because of Netflix. On a recent episode of the podcast Recode Media with Peter Kafka, Holofcener noted that the film was in development with another studio, who wanted a major star for the part. “Netflix said, ‘You can cast whoever you want,’ and I said, ‘OK: Ben Mendelsohn,” Holofcener said. “And everybody else in it [was] very hands-off, very supportive. And it was a great experience.”

It would be naive to believe Netflix is giving filmmakers like Holofcener or Private Life’s Jenkins creative freedom: The company still wants the industry’s respect, even in the era of Bright--perhaps especially in the era of Bright. And while it’s hard to imagine any of its recently premiered dramas winding up in the major awards races--for the most part, they’re not the kind of sweeping, Roma-sized tales that Oscar-voters favor--they do have a trickle-down effect: In its pursuit of Best Picture, Netflix is instead making some Very Good Ones. Hopefully, it’ll become a steady habit.