Over the years, Netflix has developed a carefully-curated and very familiar method for crafting its biggest, splashiest, and most expensive originals, reaching the stage where they’re all cut from virtually the same cloth.
Not to name any Red Notice, The Gray Man, Heart of Stone, or 6 Underground in particular, but they’ll carry budgets well north of $100 million and boast at least a couple of A-list superstars among the cast, while the story will feature a significant twist somewhere around the second act, and the CGI will be questionable more often than not despite the vast amounts of money funneled into production.
When the movie in question eventually premieres on the content library, it’ll inevitably take a battering from critics to end up with a lukewarm Rotten Tomatoes score, which will subsequently be blown out of the water by a sky-high user average and monstrous viewership figures that sees almost every single one of them without fail top the charts for at least a week straight.
It’s a recurring feature of the platform’s output and has been for a very long time, but what do you call this bespoke genre that Netflix has placed so much stock in? Well, that very question has been asked on social media, and the answers have been scathing to say the least.
In an unfortunate twist of irony, They Cloned Tyrone ticked almost all of the aforementioned boxes, but scored rave reviews and ended up flopping after nowhere near enough people decided to check it out. Netflix isn’t going to abandon this approach when it’s been proven countless times over to be a guaranteed winner, but an increased focus on quality certainly wouldn’t go amiss.