Netflix Unveils Massive Film Slate for 2021

Netflix has announced the titles that will be premiering on the streaming service in 2021 and is promising "a new movie every week."

In the 1930s and 1940s, the film studio MGM pumped out 50 new movies a year, most of which featured the world’s biggest stars at the time: Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and countless others. MGM co-founder and lead executive, Louis B. Mayer, famously boasted that the studio had “more stars than there are in the heavens.” Not long after that, antitrust regulation and the advent of television ended Hollywood’s system of studio dominance, and no company has been as prolific since.

Netflix in 2021 is the closest thing.

Last month, Disney revealed an enormous trove of new content for its streaming service, Disney+. That followed WarnerMedia’s announcement that all 17 of its films this year would be available on HBO Max the same day they debuted in theaters.

And on Tuesday, Netflix — the biggest streaming service of them all, with 195 million subscribers worldwide — announced its 2021 film slate: some 70 movies featuring Academy Award winners, box office stars and a reminder of its power in a Hollywood that has been irrevocably changed during the pandemic.

The normally secretive company made the announcement with the help of a fast-paced trailer. Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot and Dwayne Johnson, the high-profile stars of “Red Notice,” Netflix’s $160 million entry into the PG-13 action world, kicked off the video, which highlighted comedies, dramas, horror, family films and foreign-language movies. (The company did not disclose most of the release dates.)

It concluded with Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, the leads of Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up,” walking out of an aircraft carrier, a not-so-subtle reminder that the company, once an also-ran when it came to luring prestige filmmakers and big stars, is now an industry behemoth.

“We have found our way into the business with some incredible, world-class filmmakers,” Scott Stuber, the pinnacle of Netflix’s movie division, mentioned in an interview. “People saying, ‘You’ll never be able to do it,’ was personally, the easiest way to make me go do it.”

The director Jane Campion, an Oscar winner for “The Piano,” will make her Netflix debut with “The Power of the Dog,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst. Lin-Manuel Miranda will direct his first film, the variation of the stage musical “tick, tick… Boom,” whereas Jay-Z will collaborate with Netflix for the primary time by producing “The Harder They Fall,” a western starring Idris Elba, Regina King and Zazie Beetz. This month, the corporate may even launch the status movies “The White Tiger” and “Malcolm & Marie” (starring Zendaya and John David Washington) with hopes of gaining Oscar consideration.

The breadth of Netflix’s content material tells the story of the tumult within the film enterprise in the course of the pandemic. Once seen as the last word Hollywood disrupter — the largest risk to the very existence of the film enterprise — Netflix has now develop into one thing of a savior with its large attain and little dependence on theatrical distribution.

When different studios have been scaling again, Netflix went large in buying a slew of titles from the yr’s movie festivals, together with “Concrete Cowboy,” with Mr. Elba, the Rosamund Pike-led “I Care a Lot” and Halle Berry’s directorial debut, “Bruised.” Netflix was additionally capable of purchase completed movies from different studios, which selected to dump them in an effort to restore stability sheets decimated by the widespread closing of theaters.

For occasion, Disney offered Netflix its adaptation of the best-selling novel “Woman in the Window,” starring Amy Adams and directed by Joe Wright (“Atonement”). It will develop into accessible this yr, as will the buddy comedy “Bad Trip” that MGM produced and Sony’s animated movie “Wish Dragon.” (Last yr the corporate took “The Trial of the Chicago 7” off Paramount’s palms and is now selling it for Oscar consideration.)

Netflix can also be recommitting to the genres which have made it profitable. The last installments of the teenager romances “To All the Boys” and “The Kissing Booth” are coming in 2021, as are teenage horror films like the variation of the Adam Nevill novel “No One Gets Out Alive” and the “Fear Street” trilogy from the filmmaker Leigh Janiak (“Honeymoon”).

Mr. Stuber mentioned he was inspired that “the quality of the filmmaking continues to grow” on Netflix however want to enhance the corporate’s give attention to big-budget motion movies. He sees Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” as one instance of that this yr, however can also be trying past 2021 to films like “The Gray Man” starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans from Joe and Anthony Russo (“The Avengers”) and a brand new adaptation of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

In 2019, Mr. Stuber tried to achieve a take care of the main exhibitors for the discharge of “The Irishman” however was stymied by the theaters’ insistence that they get to indicate movies completely for shut to a few months earlier than they moved to Netflix.

That calculation has now modified with WarnerMedia collapsing the theatrical window fully and Universal Pictures negotiating offers with exhibitors like AMC and Cinemark that contain revenue-sharing on premium video-on-demand gross sales. Mr. Stuber continues to be occupied with negotiating with the theater chains however won’t achieve this till the pandemic ends.

“I do believe we all needed a bit of an evolution to give movies that were not made from intellectual property an opportunity,” he mentioned. “Now we are waiting to see what the theater business becomes. When that tectonic plate stops, we will be able to have those conversations. We are open to those conversations.”

January 13, 2021