Having pledged to spend almost $20 billion on original content this year, Netflix have been justifying their huge outlay with a series of massive successes over the last few months, including several of their Top 10 most-watched movies ever. And with the likes of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, David Fincher’s Mank and The Haunting of Bly Manor still to come, 2020 could well end up being their best year ever in for in-house productions in terms of quality.
However, the streaming service has also faced backlash for canceling popular shows I Am Not Okay With This and The Society after initially renewing both of them for a second season, while costly sci-fi series Altered Carbon was also axed in the wake of rumors that Netflix were set to cut back on such lavish spending in the future.
Those claims would appear to be wide of the mark, though, after co-founder Reed Hastings confirmed in a recent interview that 2021 is only going to see the volume of original content increase, although not by as much as they had originally envisioned.
“Next year, we’ve planned out the year, we’ve got a great selection of content. It’s still more originals than this year. It’s not up by as much as we first forecast, but it is up on a year-over-year basis.”
As a streaming platform, Netflix don’t tend to announce release dates years in advance like the major Hollywood studios do, but there’s still a huge selection of high-profile originals slated to arrive next year covering both movies and TV. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead and Dwayne Johnson’s Red Notice will all hit our screens, not to mention the return of Stranger Things and Mike Flanagan’s latest horror series Midnight Mass, and with plenty more projects in various stages of development, 2021 is shaping up to be another banner year for the undoubted market leader.