Netflix CEO Slams Marvel Studios For Being Too “Thrifty” With TV Budgets: “Every Time We Wanted To Add Something To The Show To Make It Better, It Was A Fistfight”
Despite each respective entry in Marvel Studios’ Defenders line being regularly heralded as some of the best media the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever produced, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos is of the opinion that Disney’s hesitance to open their wallets prevented series like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage from becoming “great television”.
Sarandos, who began his career with Netflix in 1999 as its Chief Content Officer before being promoted to his current position in 2020, offered his thoughts on Marvel Studios’ previous street-level TV endeavors while speaking to Variety‘s Matt Donnelly and Ramin Setoodeh in reflection of not just his own career thus far with the streaming giant, but also his thoughts on its future.
To this end, at the beginning of their time together, the CEO was pressed by his hosts as to whether or not he was “surprised at how quickly the industry has embraced streaming movies” across the last decade, Sarandos asserted, “I look back and we made these innovations in distribution. Some things from our early days don’t get talked about much, and some take on lives of their own.”
Asked if he could provide any specific examples of just what “things” he believed had fallen out of public consciousness, Sarandos opined, “Like the idea that House of Cards was the biggest deal ever in content. By far, our Marvel deal [in 2013] was the biggest deal in the history of television. No one will ever touch it.”
“We committed to five original seasons of TV with no pilots, 13 expensive episodes for each show centered around one character,” he added. “And then a crossover season. Ultimately, we learned a lot about the entertainment business on that deal.”
Met with this mention of Netflix’s past partnership with Marvel Studios, the results of which eventually encompassed live-action Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, The Punisher, and the crossover Defenders miniseries, Donnelly and Setoodeh took the opportunity to ask Sarandos for his opinion on Marvel’s recent Disney Plus outfit, in particular whether he felt productions like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ms. Marvel, or Echo were “successful”.
In turn, he half-heartedly replied, “I think they are. I mean, I don’t know because they don’t release any numbers,” before turning to recall his own past experiences working with the House of Mouse’s spandex-clad film and TV subsidiary.
“On our shows, we were dealing with the old Marvel television regime, which operated independently at Disney,” he explained. “And they were thrifty. And every time we wanted to make the shows bigger or better, we had to bang on them. Our incentives were not well aligned. We wanted to make great television; they wanted to make money. I thought we could make money with great television.”
As to what lessons, if any, he ultimately took away from the experience, Sarandos admitted, “You want to work with people whose incentives are aligned with yours.”
“When people are producing for you, they’re trying to produce as cheaply as possible,” he reasoned. “My incentive is to make it as great as possible. That’s a lesson that I take forever. As producers, whatever [Marvel] didn’t spend, they kept. So every time we wanted to add something to the show to make it better, it was a fistfight.”
While Netflix and Marvel Studios have since broken-up, fans can catch all the previous Defenders series, as well as the new sequel series Daredevil: Born Again, over on Disney Plus.
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