Highlights of 2023 include the David Fincher thriller “The Killer,” starring Michael Fassbender; Zack Snyder’s sci-fi epic “Rebel Moon”; and David Yates’ “Pain Hustlers,” starring Emily Blunt, which the company bought for $50 million at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Netflix is also making good on its goal of launching its content in 2023 with second iterations of “Murder Mystery” and “Extraction.”
Once unchallenged in the video streaming market, Netflix has faced increased competition from deep-seated rivals such as Disney, Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery, which it relied on for programming. That competition, combined with an increasingly saturated U.S. market, has encouraged Netflix to seek subscribers in international markets, crack down on password-sharing and introduce its advertising program.
In a letter to shareholders, Netflix said it hopes to grow its subscribers through new initiatives such as “paid sharing,” which allows subscribers to add users to accounts for an additional fee.
Netflix cited the success of its recent shows, including “Wednesday” and “Class Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” which premiered in a limited number of theaters in the U.S. before debuting on Netflix. In its last quarter, Netflix began streaming “The Bale Blue Eyes,” a period-piece detective mystery starring Christian Bale and Harry Melling.
Having already successfully established a company called Pure Software, Mr. Hastings helped found Netflix as a movie-rental-by-mail service in 1997 with Mark Randolph. Both share a corporate culture of “radical honesty” In 1998, Mr. Hastings, Mr. He gave Randolph a PowerPoint presentation explaining why he was unfit to be CEO.
Since then, in the company’s transition to streaming, Mr. Hastings played an important role. Mr. Hastings often said, “The ad didn’t come on Netflix. Period,” and it eventually came true.
