Netflix, Amazon Chiefs Vary On Theatrical

The other week, Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos drew ire for his comments at the TIME100 Summit. Netflix has long adopted a straight-to-streaming film release strategy, bypassing theatrical entirely outside of awards-qualifying or very limited commercial runs.

In his comments, Sarandos said much of the audience had effectively ‘moved on’ from the theatrical experience, saying: “I believe it is an outmoded idea, for most people, not for everybody.”

Now, participating in a chat with Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan at Mumbai’s World Audio Visual & Entertainment Summit (WAVES) conference, he says theatrical distribution and streaming can successfully co-exist and India is a shining example of it because no-one is debating exclusivity windows there:

“I was asked recently in New York if I thought cinemas were outdated, and I said, for some people, for sure. I was being interviewed in Manhattan, there’s a movie theater on every corner – you could just walk and go see a movie. I grew up in a small town in Phoenix, Arizona… I had to drive 45 minutes to go see a movie.

I think in India, it’s probably one of the more fan-centric places that enables this to happen, because they don’t get into these debates necessarily about how long the windows need to be.

I assure you that nobody, except for distributors, are talking about windows. If you go to dinner after a movie and talk about the window, you missed the mark with that movie, but most of the people just want to see movies, and how do we get to them. I do think they can co-exist in the same way.”

Meanwhile, rival Amazon Prime Video‘s top international executives have taken a different tune. Appearing at the same conference, Prime’s head of international Kelly Day says they remain steadfast in their support of theatrical exhibition. Day says:

“We understand that people are selective about what they choose to watch in the theatre, but we think that the opportunity to bring audiences together and have a theatrical experience is still pretty magical. We believe in the theatrical window.

We’re going to continue to experiment to make sure that we not only maximize the opportunity around the films, but also make sure that we can deliver them to customers wherever they want to watch them. Our ambition is to produce around 14–15 titles a year for global theatrical distribution.”

Sarandos says since 2021, Netflix’s productions in India have created $2 billion in economic impact and generated 20,000 cast and crew jobs across 90 different cities. Indian content also generated approximately 3 billion viewing hours globally on Netflix last year.

Source: Variety

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