Well, it’s here. The Gray Man -- a bland title indeed for a $200 million action film studded with big names, exotic locations, endless explosions, and mountain-high expectations -- arrived on Netflix this weekend, designed to lift the suddenly struggling streaming service days after it reported its worst-ever quarterly subscriber losses.
After a perfunctory week-long release in 450 theaters, the film hit the streaming service’s 220 million subscribers just in time to set them chatting like mad on social media about its relative merits. Who says a straight-to-streaming movie can’t command the zeitgeist?
And that was kinda the point made by Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos during Tuesday’s glass-half-full earnings call, after a quarter where the fourth season of Stranger Things set viewing records and the company lost nearly 1 million subscribers, but that was half what it had predicted.
The Gray Man is designed, along with the latest season of The Umbrella Academy and a bunch of other shows set to arrive in coming weeks, to get audiences to come back, stick around, and get Netflix headed in the right direction again.
“This is an enormous, big-budget action film that normally people would have to go out and spend an enormous amount of money to go see,” Sarandos said. “And they're gonna be premiering it on Netflix.”
Netflix hasn’t indicated yet how well the film is doing with subscribers. Netflix releases its previous-week metrics on Tuesday morning West Coast time, and it never releases theatrical grosses. But it looks like it might just be doing the job, and not just in the United States, thanks to its international cast and locations.
It’s already clear the film is one of those critics-hate-it, most-fans-love-it movies. Fans tend to jump on for the ride (especially with projects from action auteurs such as The Gray Man’s Russo Bros.), while critics harrumph about all the indie films that could have been made instead.
Rotten Tomatoes says less than half of 184 professional reviews, just 49%, were positive about The Gray Man. That’s not a great score, even for big, loud action movies, which seldom get much critical love.
By contrast, nine in 10 audience members have given the film a positive rating. There are even those putting themselves in the “‘The Gray Man is good, actually’ camp.” In a business where mass matters, Netflix will take this tradeoff.
The responses are hitting despite a relatively modest social-media campaign by Netflix itself. Film-marketing consultants RelishMix noted The Gray Man was “curiously dropping without official pages on social media with only a few posts within the Netflix social network. The top trailer on Youtube had 13.6M views with several international posts and few earned re-posts. …This looks like a platform 'spaghetti marketing' strategy of throwing the film against the wall and expecting that fans will spread-the-word, similar to Red Notice…”
RelishMix, which tracks social-media conversation for the film and TV releases of several studios, noted that Netflix’s social accounts reach a lot of people: 189.2 million fans. That mix is relatively evenly spread across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, “so, as it drops and then streams, expect to see much more internal cross-promotions.”
Scrolling through individual posts about the film on Twitter can be a dispiriting affair, mostly because it involves scrolling through posts on Twitter. But the split in audience reactions is notable there too.
Some hate the film with a venomous bile normally reserved for their mother’s killer. Others are quite delighted to go along for the action-filled ride, though some acknowledge the film’s overly familiar tropes or over-the-top excesses.
As a post by @BlandyIT put it: “See The Gray Man would be a lot better if- *gets shot in the head by people chanting "Let People Enjoy Things”* That may be the best way to watch nearly any big, loud action film, never mind this one.
It’s just this one cost $200 million to make, more than any project in Netflix history, and arrives just as the company is changing many of its approaches to keeping its fans happy.
Certainly, the movie’s imposing cast – Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Alfre Woodard, Rege Jean-Page, Billy Bob Thornton, Jessica Henwick, Indian do-everything superstar Dhanush – is the sort that can bring a lot of followers along.
Plenty of posts made it clear fans love to watch those stars do just about anything, whether it’s the malevolently mustachioed Evans plotting mayhem or the winsome de Armas wielding a rocket launcher. Dhanush, whose character has a short but memorable role, has nearly 11 million ardent followers on Twitter alone. Given Netflix’s needs in the highly competitive Indian market, he seems a lock to return in the near-inevitable sequel.
Big stars plus big action is certainly an equation Netflix has been happy to embrace, given the big audiences the formula seems to deliver. It certainly worked with last year’s Red Notice, which remains Netflix’s most-watched English-language movie of all time, with 364 million hours viewed in the first 28 days of its release. Last Christmas’ environmental satire (or something) Don’t Look Up is second on the most-watched list, with almost 360 million hours watched.
Building more of its own franchises can’t come soon enough for Netflix. As Next TV pointed out this week, yet another fan-fave show belonging to someone else is leaving Netflix, in this case 30 Rock. Now that nearly everyone else has their own streaming service, Netflix is decidedly in grow-your-own territory.
During the earnings call, Sarandos cited the 35 of its shows that received Emmy nominations earlier this month as one example of what his content teams are doing with their $17 billion budget.
Sarandos called The Gray Man is “an unbelievable proof point of what kind of films this team can put out. This is kind of back to back to back where I think Grey Man will join Red Notice, and The Adam Project, and Don't Look Up as among the most popular movies of the year, not just on Netflix, but period.”
Now comes the hard part. Making sure fans not only show up to watch The Gray Man, but stick around for months to come, watching everything else.
