Every week — every day, even — there’s a stream of new “content” flooding Netflix for its subscribers to hit play on, most of the time as background noise for when they’re busy doing something else (too bleak?). As a result, there is always a new movie or television show to report on, like Gal Gadot’s answer to Mission: Impossible — the upcoming spy thriller Heart of Stone; a new documentary about Jake Paul that no one really wanted, yet is still doing numbers; or a great filmmaker’s latest project as is Pablo Larraín’s El Conde or Mike Flanagan’s The House of Usher.
While the interest and excitement vary for each project, it’s still hard to look past the foul experiences of the people working on the great majority of them for the past decade, which they are actively fighting against by way of two massive strikes. The Netflix news cycle for the last few months has been dominated by these contrasting planes of existence where creatives come out en masse to expose the streamer’s shortcomings, while old interviews scheduled in advance as a part of the usual promo run for upcoming releases surface almost as if the biggest event to happen to the film industry in the past century isn’t currently underway.
Heart of Stone‘s Gal Gadot might put the action first, but for Matthias Schweighöfer, a nearby toilet and coffee machine beats strenuous stunt shoots any day
Gal Gadot had a point to make going into Heart of Stone — her biggest role since the armored, caped, wonderous one that put her on the map. According to the insight she shared in her episode of YouTube’s Hot Ones, the Netflix action flick needed to contrast Wonder Woman as much as possible. No glossy fight sequences with golden lassos and superpowers, but gritty physical blows that look real.
“The whole idea was to create a film that would be grounded, and the action would be raw and dynamic,” the actress said, emphasizing that she didn’t “want this to be another Wonder Woman film.”
While the action seems to have been paramount for Gadot, her castmate Matthias Schweighöfer was happy to be the guy in the chair and miss out on all the excitement. “All my colleagues had to do all the stunt scenes, and all these crazy, very dangerous looking scenes, and I had a totally fantastic cold room just for myself,” the German performer told We Got This Covered’s Scott Campbell. For some (and to be fair, almost all of us), a nearby bathroom and coffee machine aren’t easily beat when it comes to the ideal workspace. “Fantastic day. No jealousy,” Schweighöfer reiterated.
For writers in Hollywood, even if your show is Netflix’s meal “du jour,” your check will barely cover a week’s worth of groceries
You would think Suits‘ recent record-breaking triumphant comeback as it returned to everyone’s radar by joining Netflix’s catalog would be translated into a meaty turnover in the form of residuals for those who worked on the show over a decade ago. Sadly, the reality is more akin to a bucket of cold water, because even after the show he helped write was streamed for 3.1 billion minutes, Ethan Drogin was still only paid $259.71.
In an op-ed published in The LA Times, Drogin exposed the dire reality that a lot of Hollywood writers have had to deal with in recent times, which has motivated their ongoing strike. “Altogether, NBCUniversal paid the six original Suits writers less than $3,000 last quarter to stream our 11 Season 1 episodes on two platforms,” he explained. The question remains of just how much Netflix is set to profit from the billions of viewing minutes that Suits has produced for the platform.
The mind behind one of the biggest shows of the year won’t be switching sides anytime soon
If you thought Drogin’s comments were damning, then the candid words of The Last of Us creator Craig Mazin about the influence of Netflix on the entertainment industry at large will knock your socks off. The man behind the Emmy-nominated massive hit for Netflix’s main competitor, HBO, did not hold back in a recently published interview with Deadline where he discussed the impact of Netflix’s business model on the world of film and television.
“The business has been warped by the Netflix philosophy,” he started, adding that the streamer implements a model of “leveraged content creation” where supply widely surpasses demand, and statistics for success are withheld and possibly fabricated without transparency. Mazin continued by saying that streamers “don’t want to tell us how many people are watching,” because then the discrepancy in how much writers make in residuals becomes impossible to sustain.
That’s not all. Mazin also accused Netflix of lying about its profits. “They are profitable on a year-to-year basis but that profit is supported by a corporation that continues to borrow far more money than it has and makes,” the writer remarked.
The king of biopics goes full horror for his latest film, while the king of horror bids farewell to Netflix
Pablo Larraín knows how to make biographical cinema like no other. While his exploration of the life of the iconic opera singer Maria Callas featuring Angelina Jolie gears up to start production, his take on the legacy of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet titled El Conde will soon make its way to Netflix. And if Princess Diana was seeing ghosts in Spencer, then this new film takes the horror meter up a notch by turning Pinochet into an undead vampire, because sometimes verisimilitude isn’t the most effective way to expose someone’s essence. “You’re dealing with a monster who’s extremely unlikable. If for a brief second you can laugh at a tragedy, maybe that can be an act of healing,” Larraín told IndieWire. The movie comes out on Netflix Sept. 15.
Also coming to Netflix fairly soon is Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which will premiere on the platform on Oct. 12. It’s the master’s final project for the streamer after The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and more. New exclusive images of the miniseries based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe and featuring a lengthy cast including the likes of Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Carl Lumbly, and Michael Trucco, among others, were also made available by the streamer.