For every Oscar winner like “Roma,” there was an array of forgettable movies, such as “Thunder Force,” a laugh-deprived superhero farce, or “The Last Thing He Wanted,” a dreary Anne Hathaway drama that no one, it seemed, wanted to watch. It never got around to making “Medellín,” Vincent Chase’s passion project from “Entourage,” but the strain of producing so many films showed. In 2020, for instance, Netflix announced it planned to release a new movie every week. Scott Stuber, the head of Netflix’s film division, is the man responsible for feeding the algorithm, and for much of his six-year run, his mandate was clear: quantity, not quality. In a satiric ad, the late-night program hawked the streaming service as an “endless scroll,” promising that “by the time you’ve reached the bottom of our menu, there’s new shows at the top.” And when it came to movies, “SNL” joked that Netflix was so desperate for things to make, it had resorted to shooting the fake films from “Entourage.” In 2018, “Saturday Night Live” captured the public perception of Netflix as a ceaseless river of content.
