Netflix Movie Generator

What this Netflix generator gives you

Netflix has made an extraordinary number of films, and you could not name thirty of them. That is not a failure of memory. It is a consequence of how they were made and how they were released, and once you understand that, the whole catalogue starts to make sense.

Press Generate and you get one of them. A few of the titles inside:

• Beasts of No Nation
• 1922
• Night in Paradise
• Maska
• Lulli
• Love Like the Falling Rain
• 15 August
• Hilda and the Mountain King

A Korean noir, an Indian drama, a Brazilian comedy, an Indonesian romance, a Stephen King adaptation and a children's animation. This is not what a film studio's slate used to look like.

Getting a title out of it

1. Press Generate for one film.
2. Raise the quantity to pull a few and pick between them.
3. Type into Contains to search within the titles.
4. Copy to keep what you found.

Where these films come from

Netflix original films, gathered and checked by hand rather than pulled from a feed. The tool picks from that pool in your browser, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

The film that took fifty thousand dollars and changed everything

In March 2015, Netflix paid around twelve million dollars for the worldwide rights to a film about a child soldier. It was called Beasts of No Nation, directed by Cary Fukunaga, starring Idris Elba, shot in Ghana. It was the first original feature film Netflix ever released.

Netflix did something that had not been done at that scale. On the sixteenth of October it put the film into cinemas and onto the service on the same day. No ninety day exclusive window for theatres, which had been the arrangement for as long as anybody could remember.

The four largest cinema chains in America refused to show it. AMC, Regal, Cinemark and Carmike all boycotted the film. It played on thirty one screens. Its opening weekend box office was a little over fifty thousand dollars.

Now sit with that. Twelve million dollars spent. Fifty thousand dollars taken. In the old arrangement that is a catastrophe, the kind that ends careers and gets written about for a decade.

Fukunaga explained why it was not. Netflix, he said, did not need the film to be a blockbuster, and that meant they could take more risk with what it was about. There was no opening weekend to survive. There was no second weekend drop to fear. The film did not have to persuade anybody to leave the house.

Every strange thing about the list you are drawing from follows from that one fact.

What a Netflix original actually is

The label covers at least three different animals, and telling them apart is most of the skill.

Some are commissioned. Netflix paid for them from the beginning, chose the director, and owns them outright.

Some are acquired. An independent film was made with somebody else's money, went to a festival looking for a distributor, and Netflix bought it. Beasts of No Nation was one of these. So are a great many of the best films in the catalogue, because a festival is still where interesting films get discovered.

Some are licensed originals. A film was made in another country by another company, released there, and Netflix bought the rights to call it a Netflix original everywhere else. It is original the way a supermarket's own-brand biscuit is original.

None of this is dishonest, exactly, but the word original does no useful work for a viewer. It tells you who holds the rights. It tells you nothing about who made the thing or why.

Why you have not heard of half of them

A cinema release is a public event. There are posters at bus stops, a press junket, reviews in the weekend papers, a box office number on Monday that everybody reports. Even a film you never see leaves a mark on you, because the marketing was aimed at the street.

A film that opens on a streaming service has none of that. It appears in a row on a home screen, personalised to you, so your neighbour never sees it. It is not reviewed as widely, because there is no opening weekend to review it for. There is no box office figure afterwards, because there is no box office, and Netflix has never been generous with its own numbers.

The result is a catalogue of films that were genuinely made, genuinely finished, and never became public events. They did not flop. They were never given the chance to flop. They simply arrived, sat in a row for a few weeks, and slid down the page.

Which means the odds of the generator handing you something unheard of and good are much better than instinct suggests. Obscurity here is not a verdict. It is a distribution model.

The half that was never made for you

Look again at the titles above. An Indonesian romance. A Brazilian comedy. A Korean thriller. These were not obscure American films. They were mainstream films somewhere else.

Netflix commissions and buys heavily in local languages, for local audiences, in markets where it wants subscribers. A film made for viewers in Jakarta or São Paulo appears in your list because the rights happen to be global, not because anyone thought you were the audience.

This is the most interesting thing about the catalogue, and the thing the interface is worst at telling you. A film that looks like nothing in your row is often something that a whole country watched. It is not a failed Hollywood film. It is a successful film from somewhere that does not need your approval.

Telling a real swing from a filler

Not everything here is Beasts of No Nation. Some of these films exist because a comedian had a multi-picture deal and there were pictures left on it. Some are content in the truest and dullest sense of the word, made to fill a slot.

A few signals worth reading before you commit two hours.

Look for a festival. Venice, Toronto, Cannes, Sundance, Berlin. If a film premiered at one, it existed as a film before it existed as a row on a homepage, and somebody who was not an algorithm decided it was worth showing to a room.

Look at the director. Netflix has funded genuinely difficult films by directors who could not get them financed elsewhere. A famous name on a strange project is usually a swing, not a filler.

Look at the language. A film in its own language, made where it is set, has almost always been made for an audience that would notice if it were bad.

Be suspicious of the very glossy and the very familiar. A film that looks exactly like a film you have already seen, with a cast you like and a plot you can guess from the thumbnail, was probably designed to be watched half-attentively while you look at your phone. It will succeed at that.

Questions people ask

Will the film still be on Netflix?

Usually, if it is an original, because Netflix owns or holds long rights to them. That is one real advantage of originals over licensed films, which vanish without warning when a contract lapses.

Do Netflix films get released in cinemas?

Some do, briefly and in few cinemas, largely so they qualify for awards. Academy rules require a theatrical run, so a limited release is often less a distribution decision than a paperwork one.

How do I know if a Netflix film was successful?

You mostly cannot, and that is deliberate. There is no ticket count. Netflix publishes some viewing figures on its own terms, and those figures have changed definition more than once. Success here is a private number.

Why do Netflix films have a reputation for being bad?

Volume, and the absence of a filter. A cinema chain used to decide which films were worth screens, which meant somebody said no a great deal. Streaming removed the no. The good films did not get worse. They got harder to see, because they are stacked in the same row as everything else.

References

1. NPR (2015). Netflix's 'Beasts Of No Nation' Release Strategy Highlights Oscar Ambitions, on the day-and-date release, the thirty one screens and the opening weekend gross. https://www.npr.org/2015/10/19/450030365/netflixs-beasts-of-no-nation-release-strategy-highlights-oscar-ambitions
2. Variety (2015). Netflix Sets Theatrical Release Date for First Original Film 'Beasts of No Nation'. https://variety.com/2015/film/news/netflix-theater-release-beasts-of-no-nation-1201553213/
3. Beasts of No Nation, acquisition, release and the exhibitor boycott. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beasts_of_No_Nation_(film)