“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. Some say Sarandos is 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, which we’ll get to.
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.
Lin entered with a red pen and a machete, the lore goes, in hopes of emphasizing quality over quantity. Some find it convenient that Stuber’s legacy is still being kicked up, perhaps to provide cloud cover for decisions made by Lin and his former boss Bajaria. Amid the noise of the current Netflix layoffs, it’s important to remember that the prevailing logic at Netflix for a long, long time was “we don’t give a shit about theatrical,” said one colorful studio source. Releasing movies in theaters was never part of the Netflix business model. Stuber paid premiums to get filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón and Rian Johnson on the service. He also worked with fervor to make the theatrical exhibitors accept Netflix titles in any capacity. While they refused at the time, individuals familiar with Sarandos said Stuber laid the groundwork for the inevitable – that the only way to create value around movies is to put them in theaters first.
Lin brought this logic to fruition in convincing Sarandos that family-driven IP should receive robust, exclusive theatrical windows before moving on to streaming, individuals with knowledge of Lin said. We’ll see the results next year when Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” come to cineplexes.
Where Netflix once organized its internal film teams by the budget range of projects they worked on, Lin grouped his executives according to genre expertise. He also moved swiftly to program release windows left empty by Stuber’s exit (“Nonnas,” “Happy Gilmore 2,” “The Thursday Murder Club”). He spent one day of his work week with the Netflix animation team, where he installed Hannah Minghella as a leader. For the core slate, Lin is credited with wooing Alan Ritchson (“War Machine”), Matthew McConaughey and Ben Stiller for upcoming projects.
In the weeks before his exit, reports said Lin clashed with filmmaker Affleck over the just-released “Animals,” and perhaps more consequentially with Gerwig this summer over the upcoming “Narnia.” The latter 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 conversations 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.
While talk will instantly turn to Lin’s replacement (is it Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy? “Probably,” said one high-placed source), don’t shed too many tears for Lin. He ascended to Netflix from a successful, self-made business in Rideback.
“When I took this job, Bela gave me a simple piece of advice: Be yourself,” Lin wrote in a Monday memo obtained by Variety. “You work here because it’s personal. Because of that unspoken pact between your individual passion for movies and the audiences we serve. To them, movies aren’t about business. They’re about feeling something.”