The company may have been founded in 1997, but it’s only in the last few years that Netflix have ramped up their attempts for complete cultural domination. The streaming platform have long been seeking acceptance from Hollywood’s major studios to be viewed as one of their peers, and while many of them have been resistant to the idea for a long time, their seemingly endless cash reserves and string of critically-acclaimed movies and TV shows have firmly established them as a major player in the industry.
Although there’s a great deal of Netflix originals that get dumped on the service to little fanfare and fade into obscurity before a lot of people know that they’re even there, when they want to make a big deal out of something, they make sure that everybody knows. Whether it’s been awards season favorites like The Irishman, Marriage Story or Roma, big-budget blockbusters like Michael Bay’s 6 Underground and Extraction, Golden Globe-winning prestige drama The Crown or the cultural behemoth that is Stranger Things, there’s something available for every kind of taste.
However, Netflix recently saw their own 102 day winning streak brought to an end, as yesterday marked the first time since they launched the Top 10 feature that none of their originals managed to get a spot on the Top 10 Movies list. Obviously a lot of this has to do with the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, with subscriber numbers continuing to rise as millions of people around the world remain stuck indoors with little else to do, and it appears that housebound audiences have already seen all of the in-house projects that they can handle.
The average amount of hours per day users are streaming Netflix has also seen a huge jump since restrictions were first put in place, and with a lack of new content to keep them occupied, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that their originals have fallen by the wayside in favor of newer and more familiar additions to the movie library.