Everyone Thinks They Know How to Fix Netflix. The Data Proves They’re All Wrong.

Since the departures of Bela Bajaria and Dan Lin, advice has been pouring in on how to “reinvent” Netflix. Three ideas keep coming up on an endless loop—and none of them actually fix the core problem.

Ever since Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, was ousted a few weeks ago—closely followed by her right-hand man Dan Lin, head of films—industry commentators have lined up to offer advice on how Netflix can “reinvent itself” or “find a new lease on life.” All this time, I’ve had to hold myself back from responding to every piece recycling the same three talking points that have circled the streaming discourse for weeks, if not for years.

So let’s take them one by one and evaluate them on the metric that matters most right now: engagement.

Engagement sits right at the heart of Netflix’s current narrative troubles, ever since Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg tallied up the viewing hours in Netflix’s semi-annual Engagement Reports and found that total viewing time had grown by just 2% (followed by the season 2 drops we covered in-depth earlier this year). That sparked an avalanche of coverage, amplified further by data showing subscribers are opening the app less frequently and spending less time with it. None of the three popular “fixes” being pushed by pundits address those signals. Here is why.

1. “Netflix must pivot to prestige and ‘quality’ to re-ignite engagement.”

Let’s start with the most persistent argument: Netflix needs to abandon “quantity” and refocus on “prestige quality”—as if the two are mutually exclusive. Yet, that is essentially what Netflix has already spent the past two years doing, dramatically scaling back its slate of originals, particularly in the United States. But has perceived quality actually improved as a result?

Let’s look at one telling sub-category: Netflix’s US original feature films. Using Rotten Tomatoes as a proxy (measuring both the Tomatometer for critics and the Audience Score), the data tells a very clear story: since 2021, the volume of US films has fallen off a cliff, without any meaningful jump in critical or audience reception.

From 63 US films released in 2021, Netflix is down to just 23 so far this year (likely climbing just past 30 once the holiday slate arrives). Producing fewer films hasn’t moved the needle on overall quality. Even if scores have ticked up marginally over the past two years, they remain well below the peak of the 2021 lineup.

Furthermore, when we analyze Netflix’s All-Time Top 20 Most-Watched Films (measured by views over their first 91 days), the disconnect between critical prestige and raw engagement becomes glaringly obvious. Critical sentiment simply does not dictate whether millions of households hit play.

While a title like KPop Demon Hunters managed to win over both critics and audiences, the number two film on the all-time list, Red Notice, scored vastly higher with audiences (92%) than with film critics. That audience appetite, paired with star power and high-octane spectacle, explains its massive view count. Across the all-time Top 20, the average critics’ score sits at 60%, while the average audience score sits at 68%.

When it comes to viewership, audience sentiment matters infinitely more than prestige praise. That is precisely why Netflix prioritizes the “Two Thumbs Up” button in-app: subscribers dictate what thrives on the service.

Looking strictly at this year’s releases, the critical darling of the slate was Color Book. Yet on the service itself, it was one of the least-watched titles over its first 14 days by a wide margin.

So there’s no obvious correlation between critical reception, audience reception, and viewership. It’s always better to have all three, but make no mistake: in a world where Netflix seems to be judged on its overall “engagement,” and despite its promises to make “better films and series,” of the three columns in the chart above, the one that matters most is the third, not the first. And there’s no link between the two.

2. “Netflix must adopt wide theatrical releases to boost engagement.”

This argument has been floating around Hollywood boardrooms for years, usually resting on two premises:

1. Movie theaters are rebounding, providing Netflix with a lucrative new revenue stream.
2. Films released in theaters supposedly perform better when they eventually arrive on streaming.

Now, I’ll start with point number 2 because it’s the easiest to debunk, and because I already wrote a very long analysis on the subject this year that you can read by clicking below:

Ted Sarandos echoed this a few weeks ago: the films that perform best on the service are originals, but with one exception he pointed out: family and animated films, which generate lots of views and re-watches. That’s part of why Netflix will release the next Narnia, an animated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film, in theaters at the end of 2027, and likely KPop Demon Hunters 2 as well, because they’re betting that these releases won’t cannibalize streaming viewership too much.

The Top 20 most-watched streaming films in the US this year seems to bear him out: among the 8 theatrical films that make it up, 5 are animated, and the 3 live-action theatrical films post lower numbers than the originals, whether on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

That said, I’m willing to bet right here and now that Narnia or the animated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film won’t make the all-time Top 10 after their first 91 days, because they’ll have lost that freshness by the time they arrive on streaming. Even if Disney/Pixar animated films dominate the top spots in this year’s ranking, they do so at levels far below the launches of brand-new Pixar originals, and once again, that seems so obvious that I can’t believe we still have to reiterate that if KPop Demon Hunters 2 was released directly on streaming, it would rack up more views (and therefore more engagement) than if it landed on streaming 45 days after a theatrical run, however successful that run might have been.

Ted Sarandos also mentioned prestige films, which have likewise benefited from limited theatrical releases for years, but these typically generate few views on the service, so a limited theatrical release of this kind only cannibalizes engagement on the service at the margins.

Let’s turn to the question of the revenue that such wide theatrical releases would bring Netflix, because that’s also a very easy argument to debunk. The US box office is heading toward its biggest post-pandemic year, reaching $10 billion, meaning $5 billion that will end up in distributors’ pockets. Even if Netflix were responsible for 100% of all movie tickets sold in the US this year, that would only raise its annual revenue by 10%. A nice deal, sure, but even by putting its entire annual line-up in theaters, Netflix will never pocket that much.

Over the first six months of the year, Universal reported $1.089 billion from the worldwide theatrical release of its films, Paramount $290 million, and Sony $180 million — a total of $1.5 billion for these three studios (the only ones that disclose their theatrical revenue). Over the same period, Netflix posted $24.8 billion in revenue and $8.6 billion in profit. So there’s no magic money to be made at the box office, nothing that would fundamentally alter Netflix’s finances, all the more so because success there is highly volatile.

After a record year in 2025, Warner Bros Discovery’s 2026 theatrical line-up is reportedly heading toward a cumulative loss of $800 million, according to a PageSix article. That’s not necessarily the kind of headline Netflix would want to take to Wall Street. Netflix is a company that’s allergic to the unpredictable, and there’s nothing more unpredictable than a theatrical release, where a film can be judged a flop as early as the Friday morning of its opening.

3. “Netflix must ditch the binge model and switch to weekly releases.”

Whenever a high-profile Netflix original experiences a sophomore slump in viewership, the same chorus emerges: “If only they released it weekly, the buzz would last longer!”

In short, it once again seems fairly logical to me that the binge release reduces erosion within a given season, since you just have to hit “play” to watch the next episode instead of waiting a week. But erosion between seasons could perhaps be reduced if the wait between the two were shorter, particularly for shows that are fairly middling.

Here too, I wrote a very long analysis on the subject that you can read here.

What’s interesting is that other platforms are increasingly migrating toward the binge model, not away from it:

• Netflix & Peacock: Fully committed to all-at-once drops for major flagship scripted titles.
• Prime Video: Often utilizes a hybrid model (dropping season 1 all at once, before testing weekly drops on established IP).
• Disney+: Experimenting aggressively with binge drops (such as Wonder Man) and accelerated multi-episode weekly bundles.

Breaking it down further, Amazon Prime is only binge for the first season, before switching to weekly for subsequent seasons to capitalize on its most devoted fans (except in cases of an industrial disaster like Citadel). Disney has tried everything, between weekly primarily (though sometimes shortened to two or three episodes per week, as with Visionquest and season 3 of Percy Jackson) and binge this year (for WonderMan and season 2 of Chad Powers). Paramount+ also tested the binge format this year. 

If weekly rollouts were truly the magic bullet for driving engagement, HBO Max and Apple TV+ would be dominating the monthly Nielsen Gauge share. They aren’t. Releasing an episode a week doesn’t create engagement out of thin air—it merely stretches out existing interest.

The Real Solution: The Problem Is Volume

So if prestige pivots, theatrical runs, and weekly schedules aren’t the answer, what is?

The best diagnosis actually came from former CEO Reed Hastings on a recent podcast appearance with Kara Swisher: 

I think the strategy is doing more and better television shows, more and better movies. The core brand property is about being thrilling. We realized, it took a long time, that we could be distrusted, we could be disliked, but we can never be boring, OK? That the essence of an entertainment brand is to be thrilling.

Hastings hit on the critical word: more.

That’s the real heart of the problem. Between 2021, when Netflix was announcing an American film a week, and now, when it’s more like one or two a month at most, there’s a world of difference and returning to the release volume of its biggest years is what would allow it to boost engagement. Not everything would be quality, but it would let Netflix test, innovate too (remember Kaleidoscope, the series you could watch in any order, or the film Choose Love, where you could pick the ending), and multiply its chances of landing a massive hit.

The engagement problem Netflix is going through is the same one Disney+ is facing, a service that has also cut back on original productions. So the solution is to release more films and series, American ones, I mean, with big stars.

Sure, doing that is expensive. But it’s less expensive than watching your market cap lose $250 billion in a single year… Except that’s exactly what happened. The 2022 correction was triggered by the first net subscriber loss in Netflix’s history (200,000 lost in the first quarter, largely attributable to the withdrawal from Russia), but it was set up by months of market nervousness over the content-spend-to-revenue-growth ratio.

What’s interesting is the overreaction that followed. Netflix didn’t simply trim its spending, it cut to the bone. From 63 US films in 2021, we’re down to 23 in 2026 so far. From an American film a week, we’ve gone to one or two a month.

The question no one is asking is this: at what point did this reduction become a problem in itself? The answer is now. When you have 325 million subscribers and soon close to a billion users, one big US series and one big US film a month are no longer enough. Fewer releases means fewer reasons to open the app every day and every week. Fewer releases means fewer chances of landing a hit. Fewer releases means, mathematically, fewer viewing hours, the factor Netflix is being judged on right now.

The paradox is that the solution of doing more is exactly what Netflix was doing before the 2022 correction. And it was that correction that ushered in the motto “less but better.” Reed Hastings, who no longer runs the day-to-day, can afford to say that now “Netflix needs to do more and better.” The strategic question Netflix has to settle is this: at what level of content spending will the market accept slower growth? Because the alternative (changing nothing and watching engagement stagnate at +2%) will end up posing the very same question to Wall Street, but without the answer of volume to meet it.