Netflix Loses Nearly 1 Million Subscribers and Breathes a Sigh of Relief

Netflix’s film gains were more modest. “We’re making good progress in film,” the letter said. “Hustle,” the Adam Sandler basketball movie, generated the most user interest in the quarter, with 186 million hours watched. “Senior Year,” with Rebel Wilson, grabbed user attention for 161 million hours. The company is investing more in animation, announcing Tuesday that it had acquired the Australian animation studio Animal Logic.

“I think it’s really important that in tough economic times, consumers see that Netflix has tremendous value,” the other co-chief executive, Ted Sarandos, said in response to a question about how the company sees itself holding up in an economic downturn. He pointed to the film “The Gray Man,” which will become available on the service on Friday.

“This is an enormous, big-budget action film that normally people would have to go out and spend an enormous amount of money on to go see, and it’s going to premiere on Netflix,” he said. (The film was released in about 450 movie theaters last week.)

Despite the upbeat forecast for the third quarter, some analysts remain concerned that the series and movies Netflix has coming the rest of the year will suffer in comparison with its competitors’ offerings.

“To me, the big issues are the quality of the content,” said Matthew Harrigan, an analyst at Benchmark. He pointed to HBO, which will be releasing its “Game of Thrones” prequel, “House of Dragon,” in August, while Amazon is unveiling “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” in September.

“‘The Crown’ on Netflix is probably the highest-profile Q4 show they have,” he added.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/19/business/media/netflix-earnings.html