Netflix is going through some things. Last week, Bela Bajaria was fired as Netflix’s chief content officer. This week, Netflix’s film chief Dan Lin has been pushed out. The reason for these C-suite firings is because Netflix’s numbers are in the toilet across the board. People are just tired of the cheap productions, they’re tired of the lack of urgency around series renewals, and they’re tired of good/interesting new shows being canceled. Viewership numbers have plummeted and Netflix keeps signing these development deals with creatives who rarely deliver. One of the big stories within the Dan Lin gossip is that he apparently beefed with Greta Gerwig over Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.

“Everyone is collateral damage.” That’s how one top Netflix insider summarized another bloody Monday at the streamer, which saw Dan Lin ousted as the company’s head of film. Following last week’s 6% workforce reduction at Netflix – which claimed victims including chief content officer Bela Bajaria and Lin’s right-hand Doug Belgrad – consensus said it was a matter of time before co-CEO Ted Sarandos would show Lin the door.

It took a day. On the heels of the Bajaria news on Thursday, Sarandos rang Lin on Friday to tell him he’d been dismissed, three sources told Variety. The exec kept his head up and pressed on through the weekend, appearing at Saturday’s Academy Gala (in the same room as Sarandos) and at a Sunday tastemaker screening to support the filmmakers of “La Bola Negra.” As has been summarized in many articles about the Netflix purge, creative leadership at the company is being overhauled amid poor stock performance and declining user engagement on the platform. Peter Rice, the veteran film and TV executive, will now preside over and shake up the platform’s content.

Competing narratives are flying about why Lin was let go, but they arrive at the same conclusion: In the end, it wasn’t working. This, despite Lin meeting his mandates to curb spending and make movies that resonated with subscribers. In firing Lin and Bajaria and ushering in Rice, some say Sarandos was desperate to sell a story about growth to Wall Street (Netflix’s quarterly earnings report drops Tuesday). Others say Lin could not dance fast enough to find the balance between sticky streaming titles and theatrical release experiments (in fairness, he made it halfway through a five-year deal, barely enough time to get a casting announcement together by today’s standards). There are also some interesting leaks around tension he’s said to have with A-list filmmakers like Greta Gerwig and Ben Affleck.

The Lin era at Netflix was framed around austerity, both by the town and in some ways by “The Lego Movie” producer himself. A June profile in the New York Times declared Lin was done “coddling” Hollywood, bragging he did not “fawn over stars or write blank checks.” The implication was that his predecessor Scott Stuber had overpaid for talent and too-ambitiously committed to a new Netflix movie release every week in 2022. Those efforts scaled back gradually until Stuber exited in mid-2024.

…In the weeks before his exit, reports said Lin clashed with filmmaker Affleck (director of the just-released “Animals”) over the use of his AI platform InterPositive. Perhaps more consequential was a rift with Gerwig this summer over the upcoming “Narnia.” The movie represents a $250 million theatrical-first gamble.

Four sources with knowledge of the matter said that, indeed, Lin and Gerwig had a falling out during a Zoom call about the project earlier this year. On a virtual meeting populated by numerous Netflix executives, Lin is said to have been “dismissive” to the director in conversation about the progress of the film. Lin is known in town to be incredibly fair, but at times obtuse in his frankness. Word travelled fast around Netflix that the meeting had gone south, at which point sources said Bajaria called Gerwig’s producer Amy Pascal to smooth things over. Two sources also said that Gerwig’s new, all-powerful CAA agent Bryan Lourd went to Sarandos directly over the faux pas. Lin was subsequently disappeared from the film, all sources concurred, and Belgrad stepped in as the primary Netflix exec overseeing the project (until, of course, he was laid off last week).

None of the sources suggested the incident led to Lin’s firing. One Lin defender said he’s never “afraid to talk about how to make a movie better.” Another person familiar with the company said there are any number of filmmakers who could say the same about Lin’s delivery. While it may be juicy to speculate that Gerwig’s follow-up to the game changer “Barbie” could be troubled, don’t forget that the industry doubted that Margot Robbie film right up to opening weekend. “Barbie” grossed $1.44 billion at the worldwide box office and became the highest-earning release in the history of Warner Bros. Pictures.

[From Variety]

Oof, that Gerwig story is bad. I can imagine how that went over – a man being curt and dismissive to a female director hard at work on a huge production, her first since writing and directing one of the biggest hits of all time. I love that Gerwig and her agent went over Lin’s head as well, straight to Ted Sarandos. There are also industry-types noting that Sarandos is actually the one responsible for Netflix’s problems, that he hired people to do exactly what he told them to do and now he’s firing them for following his orders. Which is pretty typical, although I guarantee that Dan Lin’s poor “bedside manner” made this an easy call for Sarandos.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.