Netflix Movies Scorecard: What’s Winning, From Rom-Coms to Sci-Fi?

Here at the halfway mark of 2018, Netflix has already premiered over 50 original films. FIFTY! Some are projects Netflix saw through development, some are festival acquisitions or other shrewd pick-ups. However they arrived at Netflix, they all arrived to you the same way: slid into your various algorithm-dictated carousels of recommended movies, where you will either take notice of them or let them cycle out of your life forever. In many ways, Netflix is a lot like Tinder, but that’s for another article. The point is that while Netflix continues to do gangbusters business with their TV series, creating show after show with most of them feeling like they take a definite foothold in the pop cultural conversation. It’s a squishy metric, to be sure, but you know it when you see it: from Stranger Things to 13 Reasons Why to Wild Wild Country, Netflix’s TV series get noticed.

Historically, the same can not be said for the lion’s share of Netflix’s original films. Every now and then, a Bright or a Mudbound breaches the escape velocity to earn its place in the cultural conversation, but too often these movies come and go so quickly. With so many movies released this year, Netflix has been able to find success in certain pockets, even if other pockets have not. Last month, Netflix premiered the decidedly traditional romantic comedy Set It Up, which utilized the shockingly unused-to-date concept of two personal assistants setting up their impossible bosses so that their professional lives get less hectic. The film became a word-of-mouth hit and drove conversation on social media and in anecdotal friend conversations and generally behaved the way a movie usually does. It behaved the way Netflix TV usually does.

Earlier this year, a less heralded teenage rom-com called The Kissing Boothhit Netflix, and while it wasn’t exactly a watercooler hit, it seems to have reached its target audience in a big way. As no less a luminary as Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, pointed out, The Kissing Both shot up the charts at IMDb, signalling a huge uptick in attention.

Better than any other genre, Netflix has really appeared to have found a niche in romantic comedies that works for them. It’s a niche that is being severely underserved by theatrical releases, not to mention a genre that does not translate into television series the way that others do. If you’re of the opinion that Netflix should look into streamlining their content options, here’s a direction you might hope they go.

Of course, Netflix has shown no outward indication that they are even interested in anything like streamlining. The exact opposite is more likely to be true. In which case, okay, let’s examine Netflix’s 2018 output at the halfway mark of the year. Which genres are working for them? Which are not?

 

Romantic Comedies

As previously mentioned, Set It Up is helping to a gap that theatrical releases aren’t addressing. Just look at the reception this movie has been getting. 94% on Rotten Tomatoes! That is utterly wild. This movie isn’t While You Were Sleeping or When Harry Met Sally or any of the titans of the rom-com genre. Not even close! But what that kind of a reception tells you is that we have been starved for even passable romantic comedies lately. Throw two charm buckets like Glen Powell and Zoey Deutch into a movie together and you’re halfway there. On a more lowkey level, rom-coms like Happy Anniversary (starring Ben Schwartz and Noel Wells) and When We First Met (Adam Devine and Alexandra Daddario) offered smaller pleasures.

Teen Comedies

You could probably marry this genre to the Rom-Coms and get a good sense of the segment of the genre map that is really working well for Netflix. The Kissing Booth was a big hit for its (presumably) teen and tween audience. Dude offered something a bit more grown-up and sexy and will hopefully get a second look once people realize Hereditary‘s Alex Wolff is in it. Alex Strangelove broke into some conversations about gay movies, inviting compare/contrast to the studio hit Love, Simon. And even while The Candy Jar was a step below. it’s a pretty cute little movie about high-strung policy-debate kids.

Broad Comedy

Hits and misses. Ibiza was a Girls Trip knockoff that succeeded more than it failed, and at the very least it gave us Vanessa Bayer and Phoebe Robinson giving us antics across the globe, and for that we should all be grateful. Meanwhile, the Workaholics crew banded together for an inside-joke-y action comedy Game Over, Man! that did not seem to find the bro-y audience it was looking for. The Step Sisters deserved a bit of a better moment in the sun for that movie about a college step team. And despite earning some solid notices in 2017 for Sandy Wexler and the Noah Baumbach movie The Meyerowitz Stories, Adam Sandler’s team-up with Chris Rock, The Week Of, was dead on arrival.

Indie Comedy

Sundance acquisition A Futile & Stupid Gesture seemed to have a lot of promise, coming from director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer) and starring Will Forte as Doug Kenney, but aside from a barely recognizable Domhnall Gleeson in a supporting role, there was very little to recommend there. Another Sundance acquisition — this one from the 2017 festival — that was based on an unbelievable-but-true story was The Polka King, starring Jack Black and falling disappointingly flat.

Indie Dramas

These are movies that either had a lot of festival hype only to turn out crappy — hello, Kodachrome— or featured dynamite performances that never went anywhere because nobody was talking about them. Those include films like Roxanne, Roxanne, the girl boxing drama First Match, and the true-story of a Christian evangelist whose crisis of faith caused a controversy in his church in Come Sunday. When people talk about Netflix burying movies that might have gotten more love other places, these are the kinds of movies people are talking about. Not necessarily these exact movies, but festival-cultivated indie dramas that, when packaged right, could end up becoming another Winter’s Bone or even a Moonlight. That wasn’t going to happen with these movies, but take something like the Dave Franco/Abbi Jacobson drug drama 6 Balloons, which might not have made it anywhere, but a platform release and targeted advertising campaign might have come up with a better reason to see this movie than “There it sits, in the queue next to The Crown.”

Foreign Language

Netflix has been admirably dedicated to serving a market for non-English-language films, and while “Foreign” isn’t a genre, it’s worth talking about these movies together as a programming strategy. Some of them are incredibly broad and overly silly — neither I Am Not an Easy Man, where the gender roles of the world are magically reversed, nor the bisexual farce To Each Her Own is all that necessary — while some, like the Chinese romance Us & Them or the sparse French drama Sunday’s Illness, were really delightful surprises.

Documentaries

It’s been a slot start to the year for Netflix docs, with only Seeing Allred (about feminist lawyer and crusader Gloria Allred), Mercury 13 (about the space program), or The Rachel Divide (about racially controversial Rachel Dolezal) making any kind of dent at all. But you’d be foolish to bet against Netflix docs in the second half of the year given their stellar track record with docs in recent years (the Oscar-winning Icarus, to name but one example).

Horror/Suspense

While The Open House drew as many jeers as cheers, the film likely helped further groom in-house star Dylan Minnette (13 Reasons Why). But the festival acquisition The Ritual was an artful and terrifying win for horror fans, and Ravenous did some unexpected things with the zombie genre. Meanwhile, the Martin Freeman-starring Cargo was ranked among the best streaming movies of the year.

Sci-Fi

Okay. Here’s the bad news: Netflix might be very, very bad at making science fiction. Or acquiring science fiction. Or recognizing good science fiction when they see it. The big temptation is to call outThe Cloverfield Paradox, which premiered on Super Bowl Sunday and promptly stunk up the joint once people started watching it, for being an abject failure. However … good or bad, The Cloverfield Paradox was able to attract the kind of attention that too few Netflix movies receive when compared to their TV counterparts. So while The Cloverfield Paradox was exposed as an empty shell attempting to glom onto the Cloverfield shine, at least we were all paying attention and could discuss it all at the same time. And come next Super Bowl, believe that people will be wondering what Netflix has in store for that night.

As for Duncan Jones’s Mute or Andrew Niccol’s Anon, the depressing truth is that two giants of modern-day sci-fi cinema (Jones directed Moon while Niccol is responsible for Gattaca and The Truman Show) delivered a pair of dead fish. Each one presented a visual signature, Anon‘s gray and empty, Mute‘s garish grimy, but neither told a compelling story. Meanwhile, the less said about Sam Worthington as a mutating astronaut-fish in The Titan, the better.