In terms of Oscar contenders, 2025 was a decent year for Netflix but not an exceptional one. The days of the streamer throwing boatloads of cash at any top-notch filmmaker willing to work with them are long gone.
They acquired "Train Dreams" at Sundance 2025, and that film snuck into the Best Picture race. Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” got in as well. Expect the same thing this year, with "La Bola Negra," which Netflix picked up at Cannes, serving as their main horse in the Oscar race. That might be it as far as best picture contenders go for Netflix.
It’s no secret the streamer has been fairly conservative in greenlighting filmmaker-led projects, and Duncan Jones, who was handed a hefty budget by Netflix to make his 2018 passion project "Mute," says forget about it: those days are gone, and Netflix is out of the auteur business.
Jones is out doing press for "Rogue Trooper," and in a chat with IndieWire he was asked the inevitable question about "Mute." Did he compromise his vision? His answer was a flat "I didn't." But he doesn't think any filmmaker could say that about working with a streamer today. Jones looks back on that period of Netflix almost wistfully:
It was the sweet spot. Oh my God, I hit the sweet spot because Netflix at that time was like, 'We just want directors to come here and do what they want to do.' I was like, 'Yes, I'll do that then.' It was a moment in time because that doesn't happen anymore.
He's right. That was the era when Netflix was throwing money at auteurs to build prestige and lure talent. Remember when they were the place Scorsese, Cuarón, Baumbach, and the Coens could go when the studios wouldn't bite? Those days feel like a lifetime ago. And Jones thinks the outlook is even bleaker:
And it's about to get worse, and I'm not really sure where the streamers are going or what they want to do and the movies they want to make… I mean, the problem is the algorithm, they might be deciding what project to make, it's just going to eat itself because if they're only showing a limited number of kinds of movies and their algorithm is saying, 'Yes, this is popular. This is popular. This is popular.' It's just going to get smaller and smaller until you're only making one kind of movie with two or three actors in it. I don't know where they go from that unless they find a way to break out of that.
The prime catalyst for this risk-free change at Netflix may have been the arrival of the streaming service’s new chief of content, Dan Lin, who stated — two years ago — that the focus going forward would be to greenlight films that are “more about audience, and less about auteurs.”
So, after years of funding passion projects from the likes of Scorsese, Coen, Lee, Cuarón, Iñárritu, Campion, Cooper, Soderbergh, and Bong, among many others, the streaming giant has seemingly decided to stick to producing the kind of brainless crap that routinely invades its weekly Top 10 films (here’s looking at you, “War Machine”).
With that said, 2026 is looking… okay for the streamer, with Brad Bird’s “Ray Gunn,” David Fincher’s ‘Cliff Booth,’ Ben Affleck’s “Animals,” and Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love” coming this fall.
This week, two different UK tabloids named two different actors, Jack Lowden and Josh O'Connor, as the chosen one. That follows last week's claim that Callum Turner had been cast as 007, which tells you just how in the dark everybody is.