James Whitehead
10 days have passed since Netflix released ‘The Electric State’ on their service and I’m going to take a punt and say you haven’t watched it yet? Well, don’t feel bad, not many people have. And the ones that have weren’t so thrilled with their choices either, as the latest Netflix original continues the never-ending trend of disappointing releases.
Currently sitting at a 15% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. ‘The Electric State’ has been a huge disappointment for the studio on all fronts. Being polite, Netflix release bad films all the time, so why is this film seen as such a significant misstep for the studio? Simply put, with the investment made in the production of the film, they were expecting much better results.
The film had an eye-watering budget of $320 million dollars. It features two massive names in the leads with Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things, Enola Holmes) and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Lego Movie).
Behind the cameras were the Russo Brothers, who have churned out nothing but box-office behemoths for Disney and Marvel Studios with ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, ‘Captain America: Civil War’, ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ and ‘Avengers: Endgame’. But so far, their collaborations with Netflix haven’t hit anything close to their work in the Marvel universe.
Avengers puns aside; Netflix really believed that they had assembled a team for success. But 10 days on from its release, the data shows that ‘The Electric State’ never caught a spark. Despite opening in the weekly charts at no.1, figures now show that the film may not even break into their top 10 most streamed films.
Of course, that’s not the only metric for success, nor is it any indication of the film’s quality, after all, Netflix’s current most streamed film is the action/ comedy ‘Red One’. The less said about that film the better. But for the streaming company, the viewing numbers are important, and not enough people are even tuning in to give the film a go.
Whilst part of this can be put down to the poor reviews, the massive elephant in the room continues to be Netflix’s release strategy. Spending over $300 million dollars on one film, whilst having no intention of putting that film into cinemas, will never prove to be a sustainable practice and the sooner Netflix realizes this, the better. The reason you’ve probably not watched or even heard of ‘The Electric State’ is because Netflix metaphorically dumps their finished products onto the service and just hopes the big names involved will cause people to flock to it. But time and time again the data shows this isn’t the case.
What the data does show us is that films with theatrical releases tend to do better on streaming once they’re eventually added. When a film is being released in cinemas first, it will have a much bigger marketing budget as more time and money is put into increasing awareness. Then you give people a chance to watch it and tell other people about it. Not only do you get some money back directly with the film’s box office revenue, but when you do inevitably add the film to your site, some word of mouth and buzz has already been created through the film’s theatrical run, driving more people to watch it when it’s available on streaming.
This seems rather obvious, and the data is there to support it, but as Netflix’s higher-ups continue to be hesitant with putting their films into cinemas, it truly seems like they will continue to burn through money making these expensive flops that people forget about, quicker than ever.
Have you seen ‘The Electric State’? Did you even hear about it coming out? Let us know below what you made of the film or about Netflix’s track record with their original films.
