✉️ The "Best" of Netflix

Most of the best performing content is mediocre at best

Jul 20, 2020

This weekend, we watched The Old Guard, the latest Netflix original starring Charlize Theron. And it was fine. Not great. Not bad. Totally passable and yet utterly forgettable. I feel like this is a trend. A rather interesting one.

Now, I’ll caveat all of this by saying that obviously this is just my opinion. And it is, of course, subjective. And my broader thoughts are largely anecdotal. Still… it sure feels like a lot of the most popular Netflix movies (if not “shows” as well, which are harder to “rate”) are decidedly mediocre.

Look at the all-time top ten list. Admittedly, I’ve only seen five of them. Of those, Bird Box was interesting, but not great. 6 Underground was pretty bad. The Old Guard, again, mediocre. The Irishman was very good, but far too long. Triple Frontier was very watchable but not great. The others on the list all have lukewarm-to-poor reviews in aggregate so I’m guessing I would feel the same way.

(The best of the rest would clearly seem to be The Platform, at number ten, which is a Spanish-language sci-fi thriller.)

Now certainly the “best” movies don’t correlate to the best performing at the traditional box office. But the reason why Hollywood has been up-in-arms about Rotten Tomatoes has been because it can sync mediocre-to-bad movies before they launch. The same clearly does not seem to be the case with Netflix.

Perhaps it’s the instant-watch capability. Their algorithm. Or perhaps it’s the “ah what the hell, I’m already paying for this service” aspect. Or maybe it’s just that critical “taste” matters far less in the home. Whatever it is, it’s fascinating that these movies seem to outperform on Netflix, at least for now.

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Asides

A call to quit Chrome, the resource-heavy, battery-hogging web browser. Hard to disagree. Google says remedies are in the works. We’ll see. 🔋
Lego and Nintendo are making an old school NES kit, complete with a “vintage” TV. Hard to be more sold on anything… 📺
…including a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. selling for $114,000. 🕹
Speaking of streaming records, Greyhound apparently set some for Apple TV+ — which perhaps isn’t saying much given how new the service is with relatively little content. Still, it was good. ⚓️
Feels like a fairly honest assessment of what life could look like in 2022. 🔮
I heart Milton Glaser because he made most of his money from Brooklyn Beer — opting for equity! — not from ‘I ❤️ NY’ (which he did pro bono). RIP. 🍺
An iPhone 12 shipping without a charger will be controversial. Shipping with braided cables that don’t crack after a year without fail will not be. 📱
Great summary of the California High Speed Train Project to date:

The California High-Speed Rail saga is kind of like the Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown gag, except that Charlie Brown and Lucy are now both about 85 years old and still doing the exact same gag over and over. 🚄

Apple beats the EU over their Irish tax bill. Which seemed obvious years ago, so it’s not clear why it took so long. 🇮🇪
New emoji are inbound! The lungs feel a bit #toosoon? Speaking of, this will apparently be the last new emoji before 2022 due to COVID work delays… 🤡
Pretty incredible write-up for Sarah Gilbert’s currently-leading efforts to come up with a COVID-19 vaccine (disclosure: GV is a proud investor in some of the companies working on this). Key quote: “one member compared her effort to going into a shed and coming out with a jet engine.” 🦠
Unclear what SoftBank’s gameplan is with ARM, but regardless, it simply must matter to Apple. And the timing of all this right after Apple announces their own ARM-based silicon for Macs certainly doesn’t seem coincidental… 🖥
On the age-old question of how to value a company — why I prefer to focus on the nebulous “one step ahead” companies — Saku Panditharatne:

It’s often said that tech companies “ship their org chart,” meaning that the products they create can be directly predicted by the structure of the organization. By looking at the people and incentives, an outside observer should be able to estimate the impact, quality and probability of success of a new product, and perhaps even future revenue. If Apple had hired a world-class team of chip engineers who had all taken a pay cut to work on a cutting edge project, we might expect its share price to rise on the news, though without a better valuation method, we can't yet say precisely by how much. 📈