Greetings, average American viewer, it’s me, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, taking time out of my busy day to talk to you. I wanted to take a moment to address some of the concerns that have recently cropped up over my company’s pending merger with Warner Brothers, a merger that an extremely vocal minority on the internet seems to take issue with.
The chief concern among these rabble-rousers seems to be that the merger will create a monopoly on entertainment and virtually end movie-going as we know it. They were quick to twist my words around when, in a recent interview, I casually mentioned that going to the theater really only makes sense if you live in a place like Manhattan. I assure you, this quote has been taken completely out of context. What I meant was that going to the movie theater only makes sense if you live in a place like Manhattan, and that’s FINE! You don’t need the dumb old movie theater and all the dumb old cherished memories you have of going to it! Not when you have Stranger Things and thousands of television shows even worse than Stranger Things just a few clicks away! And hey, when you get tired of ignoring those on your phone, why not mate with the person next to you and produce some future labor?
Look, theaters suck. I know it, you don’t get a say in the matter, we all know it! If you don’t live in Manhattan, which you will never be able to afford to do in your wildest dreams, chances are your “local” cinema is roughly 1000 miles from your couch. Even if you’re willing to make the trek, you have to wear clothes, they don’t let you vape or use your phone, they don’t even let you have meaningless sex with your Feeld date! How are you supposed to create an unwanted pregnancy, trapping you into a lifetime of joyless labor when you’re stuck at the dumb old movie theater?! Not to mention you have to pay through the nose for snacks because whoopsadaisy, you left your fridge at home! Who needs all that hassle when you can just ignore joylessly produced, cheaply oversaturated, mediocre films like Bright, Coin Heist, and Christmas Inheritance right from your living room?!
Okay, here’s a prime example — Adam Sandler movies. It used to be the case that they were good, but there weren’t very many of them, you had to go all the way to the damned movie theater just to watch one (booo! hiss!), and they would get released years apart! But now, thanks to his deal with Netflix, he’s churning them out faster than you can say ‘diminishing returns.’ Are they as good as they used to be? Who cares, you are getting sleepy! Sleepy. Sleeeeeepyyyy.
I resent the implication that I am single-handedly responsible for the “dumbing down” of entertainment and the cheapening of culture as a whole. Does all of our content have the same, cheap, digitally darkened sheen to it? Yes. Do we force creators to have characters repeat the plot several times so people on their phones can follow along? Yes. Does our policy of never sharing analytics with anyone destroy the leveraging power of artists and silence the voice of auteurs? Absolutely, but do I give a shit about any of that?
The fact of the matter is, here at Netflix, we are committed to generating content that hooks you in, meanders for a while, and gently lulls you into the sort of boredom that causes you to make the biggest mistake of your life with someone you barely know. The Water Wars are right around the corner, people, so quit your highfalutin notions of going to the movie theater and Netflix & Chill us up some soldiers!
If you have a problem with any of this, I urge you, talk to your doctor about Wellbutrin. In closing, here’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” by Kate Bush.
