Netflix cleared 3.6 billion in profit and cut its ad forecast anyway

Netflix cleared three and a half billion dollars in profit last quarter. Net income up forty-four percent, per Xinhua, operating margin at 34.6 — the kind of number you post when you've worked out how to charge people more for less and they just keep paying. Then, having printed that money, the company cut its own ad-revenue forecast, down to 2.7 billion from three, shoved the ad-tier rollout into 2027, and watched the stock fall five percent anyway because Wall Street is a mood ring and the mood was bad. They fired a thousand people earlier this month. The part nobody said out loud is that the layoffs weren't a rescue. They were a tune-up on a car already doing ninety. You don't gut the product and legal departments because you're broke. You do it because the spreadsheet said you could, and the spreadsheet is the only executive at Netflix who never gets fired. Peter Rice, the Disney exile they hired to run content, officially takes the chair Monday. Welcome aboard, Peter. Here's your corner office and a slate made of a dead Starz drama and a pizza shop.

The Drops

The One About Matthew Perry (Netflix). The big one is a grief doc. Three episodes, about fifty minutes each, out the 27th, directed by Mary Robertson, who made Quiet on Set and knows how to build a case out of archive and testimony. His sister Mia's in it. His friends David Pressman and Roger Castillo are in it. Warren Littlefield, the old NBC boss, turns up. The three Friends castmates who could actually move the needle, Aniston and Cox and LeBlanc, are not, which GoldDerby confirmed, and which tells you something about either the project or the grief. Here's the part that got me. Netflix scheduled it for October 27th. Perry died October 28th, 2023. They are releasing a documentary about a dead man exactly one day before the anniversary of his death, which is either a coincidence or the most Netflix decision of the year, mourning release-dated for maximum open rate. The doc itself might be good. Robertson's careful. The timing is a war crime committed by a calendar app.

Minimum Wage (Netflix). A mockumentary about teenagers failing to run a pizzeria, adapted from viral shorts by a Syracuse comedy outfit called American High. Netflix ordered twenty-eight episodes. The first fourteen land Monday, around twelve minutes each, so you can watch half a season in the time it takes a DoorDash order to go cold. Randall Park shows up as a guy named Mr. Sylvester. Cheap, fast content for a generation that learned comedy in sixty-second increments, and against every instinct I have, the shorts were funny. Low bar. They clear it.

Dangerous Liaisons (Netflix). Hits the 27th, and it's not new — it's the short-lived 2022 Starz costume drama, the one about young Merteuil and Valmont scheming through pre-Revolution Paris before they grew into the famous versions. Starz made it. Starz couldn't keep it. Now it washes up on Netflix like driftwood with good cheekbones. If you missed it the first time there was a reason, and the reason is nobody told you it existed.

The Wolves of Real Estate: The Alexander Brothers (Peacock). A three-part true-crime doc about Oren, Tal, and Alon Alexander, the luxury-real-estate brothers convicted of sex trafficking in March and awaiting sentencing this month, built on the New York Magazine reporting that broke it open. The streaming version of justice: a man gets convicted and inside a year his face is a thumbnail with dramatic strings under it. On Peacock, which somehow still exists.

Hulu's got The Mob, a reality competition in the Traitors mold, because every streamer now needs its own show where strangers lie to each other in a nice house. Mission: Yozakura Family starts streaming for the anime crowd. And if you're keeping score, the week's only genuinely new scripted thing is one pizza mockumentary. Everything else is a rerun, a reality format, or a dead person.

Pick of the Week

The One About Matthew Perry, if you can hold your nose at the release date. Robertson doesn't do hagiography — Quiet on Set had teeth — and Perry deserves a real accounting a lot more than he deserved being scheduled against his own anniversary. Watch it for the man. Resent the calendar.

The closer

Netflix made three and a half billion dollars in ninety days and the thing it's proudest to hand you this week is two and a half hours of a man who isn't here to see it. Peter Rice walks in Monday to a library that's half grief and half pizza. Somewhere a spreadsheet is thrilled. See you next week, assuming the ad tier launches in your country, which it won't, because that got pushed to 2027.