Ted Sarandos covers this week’s Variety. He’s celebrating 25 years at Netflix, a time period in which he’s turned a DVD-by-mail service into a $410 billion streaming juggernaut. Netflix pioneered all of this, and Sarandos watches Netflix’s imitators carefully. I came away from this interview sort of fascinated by him and his vision. So many people in Hollywood consider him to be the guy who will single-handedly ruin the theatrical movie experience, but Sarandos actually loves going to the movie theater (and Netflix owns a theater too). He dished about Netflix’s upcoming year, which includes new seasons of Squid Game, Wednesday and Stranger Things, plus new movies from Guillermo del Toro and Noah Baumbach. And a new Knives Out! One of the biggest headlines from this piece is when Variety asked him about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Some highlights:
In 2017, he said he didn’t understand Amazon’s original content strategy. “This is just me as an observer. Sports has been very effective. And I don’t know if that’s their entire strategy.”
Whether he thinks Amazon will be able to compete with Netflix longterm: “I don’t. It’s hard for me to say. I don’t know what their long-term plans are. They’ve been streaming exactly as long as we have. They’ve been making original content exactly as long as we have.
What he thinks of AppleTV’s original content: “I don’t understand it beyond a marketing play, but they’re really smart people. Maybe they see something we don’t.”
Whether Netflix will renew its partnership with the Obamas: “I don’t want to comment on anyone’s renewals. In general, the ones that we’ve had are bespoke and rationalized around output. I think of them as “show-verall” deals. We outline what we’re going to do together over the next five years and package it in a deal.
Netflix’s investment in the Duchess of Sussex’s As Ever line: “We’re a passive partner in Meghan’s company, and it’s a big discovery model for us right now.
Whether Meghan is the right person for Netflix to bet on: “I think Meghan is underestimated in terms of her influence on culture. When we dropped the trailer for the “Harry & Meghan” doc series [in 2022], everything on-screen was dissected in the press for days. The shoes she was wearing sold out all over the world. The Hermès blanket that was on the chair behind her sold out everywhere in the world. People are fascinated with Meghan Markle. She and Harry are overly dismissed.”
Whether the investment in the Sussexes is anything beyond a marketing play: “It’s good for marketing and branding. This is all expressions of fandom. I don’t really see us having theme parks, but I do see us having a lot of touch points with consumers like this. I admire the Topgolf model versus the Disneyland model, where people go more frequently through the year and you come back to check things out. We’re going to be much more part of our fans’ lives than going into Disneyland once every couple of years. And I’m not sh-tting on Disneyland.”
This is not the first time someone in the Netflix C-suite has stood up for the Sussexes and maintained that Netflix is absolutely on good terms with Harry and Meghan. Maybe the British media will finally believe it when it comes out of Ted Sarandos’ mouth, you know? Clearly, Sarandos sees something there, and he knows that there’s an especially rabid fascination with everything Meghan does, says and wears. And he wants to be part of that, and he wants to profit from it and he wants to find the best way to monetize that fascination.
I’d just like to point out something else though – while Sarandos is defending Meghan and standing by WLM and As Ever, he’s also making it clear that it’s not like Netflix is laying out a fortune on this experiment. That’s what I said when I saw WLM – it will be so easy for Netflix to greenlight a dozen seasons, because it’s so inexpensive to produce. It’s the same with As Ever – the money Netflix is putting into As Ever is basically a rounding error for a $410 billion company. That, more than anything else, is why it’s easy for Sarandos to support the Sussexes. Because it really doesn’t cost him that much to do so. Plus, I think he genuinely likes Meghan.
Photos courtesy of Netflix, cover courtesy of Variety.
