‘The Cloverfield Paradox’: Why The Film Was a Win For Netflix No Matter What

The Cloverfield Paradox dropped on Netflix last night immediately after the Super Bowl. It was something of a pop culture coup for the streaming service: they announced the film’s arrival with only a single 30 second commercial during the big game. There were no screenings, no advance press, and no prolonged hype train to herald The Cloverfield Paradox. It just dropped, Beyoncé-style, at around 10:18 PM ET (i.e. in the minute after the Super Bowl was officially called for the Philadelphia Eagles).

The film is already dividing audiences. As of writing this, the film has a measly 13% Tomatometer rating, but is netting a positive 63% favorable audience score. I watched the film last night and while it is rather a hollow, nonsensical riff on Alien, it’s elevated by its cast of acclaimed international performers. Gugu Mbatha-Raw makes her best argument to date for A-list stardom as the film’s lead, Ava Hamilton. She is at once brave, bold, smart, and exquisitely vulnerable. (And do I personally want a movie just about Daniel Bruhl and Zhang Ziyi being a hot polyglot nerd couple in space? Yes, yes, I do.) There are also unanswered questions about how exactly this film connects the Cloverfield series. So, it was the Shepherd that caused the Kaiju attack? Is Ava’s husband hiding out in 10 Cloverfield Lane Howard’s bunker of doom? HOW DOES THAT TIMELINE EVEN WORK?

Nevertheless, The Cloverfield Paradox is a huge win for Netflix. The streaming giant finally figured out how to make streaming a movie an exciting, communal experience. Movies have been something of a challenge for Netflix’s original slate. Sure, they can tout Bright as a hit, even though critics hated it. And although they are elbowing into the Oscar race with films like Mudbound, there’s still a sense that Netflix hasn’t figured out how to best position gems like Dee Rees’ exceptional look at racism in America. Netflix is still learning how to get people as hyped for their original films as they are for a new season of The Ranch.

Streaming is a personalized experience; we stream on our phones, tablets, laptops, and at our leisure on our TVs. Movie-watching, on the other hand, has typically been a communal one. Films are designed to be watched in theaters on big screens. We see this in the way they’re produced, from their star power and jump scares to their aspect ratios and sumptuous imagery. Netflix is not designed for a communal film-going experience, even though culturally that’s something that’s still appealing. So how can Netflix get a whole bunch of people watching the same movie at almost the same time? How can you create a buzzworthy, communal streaming experience in 2018? Well, apparently you drop a science fiction sequel film on Netflix right after the Super Bowl.

I was one of those nerds who flipped over to Netflix as soon as the Super Bowl concluded. I wanted to see what this great gambit was all about, and I also didn’t want to experience the FOMO of seeing other people on my twitter feed talking about the film before I got a chance to see it. I was compelled by the rush of curiosity, and I wasn’t the only one. For the first time in my life, I was streaming a movie at a exactly the same time as friends and strangers on my Twitter timeline. I could even tell that most of us were synched up — within five minutes or so — based on the snarky jokes, hastily-made screenshots, and flailing reactions. And when the film was over, I was immediately drawn into debate about it. What was good? What was bad? Did Netflix dump the film like this because they thought it sucked? Or was it a masterful bit of strategy? A lot of my film critic pals hated the film, and yet I saw others, like director Ava DuVernay, praise Netflix for taking this leap with a film boasting such a diverse roster of creatives.

Netflix succeeded in creating a communal moment around The Cloverfield Paradox. They managed to get people to watch a film together, even while they streamed apart. Moreover, they showed that they really can eschew traditional methods of film promotion. So much of Netflix’s struggle to fit in with the Hollywood status quo has boiled down to how people can rectify Netflix’s distribution model with the traditional one. The Cloverfield Paradox might just prove that Netflix doesn’t need to fit into Hollywood’s box. They can do it their own way.

Ironically, there is a tiny paradox to The Cloverfield Paradox‘s “win.” In order to muster all this buzz — to get a bunch of people to tune into a Netflix Original movie at the same time — Netflix had to piggyback off of traditional media. Namely, the Super Bowl. It’s one of the few times a year that a vast majority of Americans are still tuned in to the exact same broadcast at the same time, and Netflix used this synchronized audience to hype The Cloverfield Paradox. Could they replicate this kind of film drop without a massive tune-in campaign like this? Could they also do it without a recognizable franchise like Cloverfield? That remains to be seen, but if nothing else, dropping The Cloverfield Paradox last night proved to be a big experiment and Netflix can learn from how it played. That’s maybe the biggest reason why it was a win: Netflix can do it better next time.

Speaking for just myself, I would like to see if Netflix can capture a communal audience like that again. It was fun and exciting, and it made watching a film on Netflix a far friendlier experience than it had ever been before.

Stream The Cloverfield Paradox on Netflix