Two summers ago ago, when Netflix announced it was backing Brad Pitt’s pricey combat comedy War Machine, the reaction in Hollywood was perhaps best summed up by the shocked-and-awed headlines of the press: “Game changer”! “Whoa”! “What does this mean for theaters?”! Their stunned surprise was understandable, given that Netflix’s only notable foray into original filmmaking by that point was a four-movie deal with boor machine Adam Sandler. Enlisting an Oscar-nominated, movie-star megalodon like Pitt—along with his production company, Plan B, which had recently won its second Best Picture Oscar with 12 Years a Slave—was a sign that Netflix wanted to invade the movie industry the same way it had overrun the TV industry.

A few years later, the concept of “a Netflix original film” is far less jarring, at least to viewers. Ever since the War Machine deal was made public, the company has charged head-first into the film business, with a mix of self-financed productions (the wonderfully shaggy revenge thriller I Just Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore); moderately pricey acquisitions (the bleak, brutal Beasts of No Nation); and a slew of cheaper festival pick-ups (the well-reviewed romantic caper Tramps). So far this year, Netflix has added a new original movie pretty much every week, including April’s Sandy Wexler, its third Sandler feature in a year and a half. To those who long ago either ditched or dialed back their theater-going in favor of streaming, Netflix has become just another logo that appears before whatever new thing you happen to be watching that night.

But what, if anything, does that logo represent? Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, as the major studios added more niche divisions and the indie sector flourished, you could often tell what kind of movie you were going to get based on who was putting it out. Over the years, Miramax went from foreign-language powerhouse (Cinema Paradiso; Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) to movie-brat romper-room (Clerks, Pulp Fiction) to the Höuse of Hallström (Chocolat, The Shipping News). Dimension was the place for brainy schlock (Scream, Mimic); New Line Cinema was where you went for mid-budget pulp and frivolity (Set It Off, Austin Powers). And Fox Searchlight was the studio most likely to try to stuff a mix-tape into your locker (Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite). These are reductive, era-dependent descriptions, obviously; every studio’s identity shifts over time. But they were identities nonetheless.

Netflix’s aesthetic philosophy, if one even exists, is far more elusive. Unlike competitor Amazon, which has spent the last year zeroing in on grown-up dramas (including theater-first hits like Manchester by the Sea and The Handmaiden), Netflix’s output is all over the place. Next month, it will release Okja, a broad, anti-corporate comedy-thriller about a miraculous oversized pig, directed by Snowpiercer‘s Bong Joon-ho. After that comes the love-struck Sundance comedy The Incredible Jessica James; the Gawker-trial documentary Nobody Speaks: Trials of the Free Press; and the Lily Collins/Keanu Reeves anorexia drama To The Bone. Only a few years ago, these movies would likely have wound up at a major studio’s specialty division, where they’d have been target-marketed accordingly. Now, they’ll arrive as part of Netflix’s zone-flooding original-movie monsoon, one in which deep company pockets and algorithmic “Because You Watched” wizardry ensure there’ll be a new, specifically aimed movie for everyone, even if most other subscribers barely know it exists.

Which is what makes today’s release of War Machine so epochal. It’s the biggest Netflix release so far: Made for a reported $60 million, its release was heralded via prime billboard space along L.A.’s Sunset Strip, multiple premiere galas, and a lengthy GQ Style cover spread. And it’s the kind of topical, serious effort that usually draws the attention of Academy voters (to date, Netflix has never earned an Oscar nom for a narrative feature, though it’s enjoyed success in the documentary categories).

Based on Michael Hastings’ 2012 book The Operators, about General Stanley McChrystal’s ultimately doomed leadership stint in Afghanistan, War Machine stars Pitt as a McChrystal-like leader whose hubris and humanity far too often cancel each other out, leading to a serious of self-crippling decisions. Its mix of social satire, war thrills, and political backstabbery isn’t always a winning coalition, with writer-director David Michôd leaning on voice-over to do the story’s dirty work, and the characters lingering far too long in the barracks before its affecting third act. But Pitt—sporting gray hair and a dyspeptic, cock-eyed stare—gives his four-star general a straight-arrow awkwardness, and Ben Kingsley and Atlanta‘s Lakeith Stanfield and Ben Kingsley turn in winning supporting performances. If your weekend new-movie choice is between War Machine and Pirates of the Caribbean 5: Wow, Dude LITERALLY Looks Like Rango Now, you should probably head straight to Afghanistan.

Of course, we’ll never know just how well War Machine performs this weekend—or any weekend. Netflix famously refuses to disclose specific viewership numbers, instead issuing the occasional head-scratching stat, like the fact that users streamed half a billion hours of Sandler movies in 2016 alone (full transparency, apparently, is a company-wide Sarandon’t).

The importance of the movie’s numbers, though, pales in comparison to the fact that it was made at all. Everything about War Machine—from its poster-dominating star to its auteurist helmer to its semi-dark subject matter—signals that Netflix is moving toward the kind of R-rated, adult-aimed films the major studios essentially stopped making a few years back, partly because they were losing eyeballs to outlets like…Netflix. Several films on the the company’s upcoming slate are pricey, star-driven, and potentially culture-jamming movies, making them just the sort of films a major like Warner Bros. or Paramount might have commissioned a decade ago: Bright, a $90 million action-fantasy starring Will Smith, and directed by Suicide Squad‘s David Ayer; The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s nine-figure mob drama with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci; and a just-announced Ava Duvernay-directed caper possibly starring Rihanna and Lupita Nyong’o. Even its smaller movies are getting bigger, with the company spending $12.5 million at Sundance to buy the historical drama Mudbound—one of the largest deals of the festival.

If that makes you a bit nervous about the future of theater-going, you’re not alone. Earlier this month, at Cannes, the company’s logo was reportedly booed at a screening of Okja, while jury president Pedro Almodovar read a manifesto arguing for the sanctity of the big screen. The movie cognoscenti is ready to resist not just Netflix, but the very notion that great films should be reduced to size of a smartphone. It’s a debate that pits our love of art versus our lust for convenience—a fight that, in the digital era, usually ends up favoring whichever solution gives us what we want as quickly as possible. For Netflix, the challenge is catering to those desires as the company expands. Do viewers crave the smaller, gotta-seek-’em-out kind of films the company has been stockpiling the last year? The expensive, star-struck event films it’s planned going forward? Or does the company want to make everything, in order to please all of us? If it’s the latter, they may want to strategize carefully; if history’s any indication, hearts-and-mind battles are usually the hardest to win.



WIRED