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It really depends on your opinion of issues that probably only truly matter to a limited number of people. Here's a condensed but still "lengthy for a message board" look at some of Netflix's history. A company I've been obsessed with for over 20 years. When Netflix started streaming they changed the game in a way that truly altered Hollywood's money model. The first element to get affected was DVD sales. DVDs were the golden goose of Hollywood and could turn a movie that performed poorly at the box office into a profitable one. That shit is gone and never coming back and every Studio misses it. That was Heel Turn #1. But only if you give a shit about physical media and whether it makes you sad that Warner Bros can't get more money out of Pirates of The Caribbean 4 when it didn't do so as well as they hoped. But Netflix spent a lot of money in those days. And so studios were willing to work with them. The amount of money Netflix was willing to spend on the rights to stream Seinfeld or Friends or whatever was astronomical, and studios were glad to take it. Their(the studios) plan was to take all this money Netflix was throwing around and use it to finance their own streaming service. Studio +. Sudio Max. Sudio Unlimted. And then they thought once the rights contracts were up everyone would come to their service. Can't watch Star Trek anywhere but Paramount + so come on over for only 9.99 a month. At the same time this was happening, Netflix was spending even MORE money to produce original shows. Orange is the New Black. House of Cards. Stranger Things. This was Netflix's YOLO Era because they were spending wild money on shit that had no proven track record and little evidence of a return. We all remember Eli Roth's Hemlock Grove, right? Directors and Writers loved this period because the studios had stopped being so loose with the coin purse on account of DVD sales disappearing. So Netflix was the new home of mid budget storytelling. Maybe they're not a heel... maybe they're really the face... During that YOLO Era, Netflix was a debt machine. They made 0 profit. They could only take out credit on the backing of their sizeable subscription base. Billions of dollars in rolling loans that would be paid off over years by their subscription base. This was also the period when Netflix started to make enemies with actors. News started to get out that because Netflix was a different beast than the old model they could circumvent certain aspects of Union contracts. So shit like residuals went out the window. I found out that I made more money in residuals off of my one episode of Chicago PD than the cast of Orange is the New Black made off of residuals for their entire run. It's fucking crazy. So Netflix started to feel a little like they were anti-Union. Where you stand on that is where you stand. I'm not judging. But I'm an actor, so I stand on a certain side of that particular issue. And while the Yolo Era was great for weird ass new content, creatives started to realize what it felt like to be a youtuber, because their show was dropping and no one was discovering it. Unfulfilling. And again Netflix stopped distributing shows to DVD so if you made something for them it was lost in the giant infinite scroll of content. This is a bone of contention between them and a few creators, who are mad their show is locked a way in Netflix's walled garden. The studios who were hemorrhaging money trying to make their own streaming service, decided the only way to compete was to shorten the window a movie played in theaters, or by eliminating the window altogether and premiering a film on their platform directly. This pissed directors off because it also meant their work would be confined to a limited group of people who subscribed to something like HBO Max- like the Wachowskis and their fourth Matrix movie. This is around the time it became popular to blame the Netflix model for all the problems in Hollywood. And to some degree, it's not totally wrong I guess. Netflix disrupted the industry - and the studios weren't very creative in responding to it. Around 5 years ago, Netflix changed their philosophy again. The Yolo Era was over. They were sick of being built on a house of cards that was their debt. They stopped spending money on whatever wild shit some creator pitched them. They started looking at accountants to determine whether a film could be profitable or useful to their portfolio. They basically started running their business like an actual business, and now they're highly profitable, and no longer a debt factory. In some ways- good for them. In other ways - that kind of sucks for the art of film because we're running out of places where people can try original ideas that aren't obviously profitable from their inception. So they essentially adopted the same business practices that some folks hate studios for. To paraphrase CM Punk: They went from being the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees. But to make that profit they did do two particular things that pissed off everyone. They raised their prices at a higher rate than any of the competition would imagine doing it. And they introduced ads(The Ultimate Heel Turn~!). And while most of the problems that I've listed so far don't really concern the average viewer, I feel like once ads and wildly higher subscription fees entered the picture, some folks internalized all of the issues - even the ones that probably didn't matter to them until this point. What's crazy is that even though prices have gone up significantly, Netflix's subscriber base doesn't go down. So every price increase is basically an automatic influx of 100s of millions of dollars. Every time. If you like Netflix and enjoy streaming their stuff. Don't worry. You're not a bad person. If you see Netflix getting HBO Max and all these Warner Bros. properties as a great thing - you're totally okay. It's like when George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney. Some folks were like "awesome, we get new movies beyond that terrible prequel trilogy." And others were like, "Oh no Disney is buying up our childhoods and ruining it, the blood thirsty animals." ...Both sides were right on that one I guess. I personally hate this consolidation of intellectual property, just like how I hated it when Disney bought all of FOXs stuff, but it's a personal niche thing that I don't expect anyone to care about outside of me. For me, it's about the history of cinema and it being in the vault of a singular entity, who will dictate whether you can see it and how. Some folks just don't have a horse in that race, and with everything else that matters in this world I just don't feel like telling folks they need to add that issue to their plate. TLDR: Netflix is kinda like the John Cena of Hollywood. Let's Go Netflix. Netflix Sucks.

What better way to start off this thread again than making you all look at the Robbie Williams Monkey in the collosal flop that was his biopic: