M.G. Siegler • #netflix • Jul 18, 2025

The Great Okay Part II

Netflix continues to churn out decidedly mediocre hit movies

Five years ago, I noticed something funny. Well, actually not funny. Funny would be good in this situation. Let's go with odd. Basically every movie in the list of top performing (original) movies on Netflix was mediocre. A couple were fine, a few were bad, but for the most part, they were right-down-the-middle mediocre. Yes, I based this largely off of their reviews (in aggregate), but having had seen most of them, it was impossible for me to disagree. It was either a testament to taste... not mattering. Or, more likely, to the power of Netflix.

Here we are again five years later. With their Q2 earnings, Netflix released a list of the best performing content so far this year. While the shows are also fairly mixed (though led by Adolescence, which pretty much everyone says is amazing – I have not seen it), the movies, well... you know where this is going.

Let's look at the list and each movie's Metacritic score (which I find to be far more accurate than Rotten Tomatoes scores for my own taste). The scores are out of 100:

Back in Action: 46
Straw: 56
The Life List: 49
Exterritorial: 38
Havoc: 57
The Secret Lives of Pets 2: 55
The Electric State: 30
Counterattack: 60
Ad Vitam: 40
Despicable Me 4: 52

A couple quick notes: there are not enough reviews of Exterritorial to give it a proper 'Metascore', but the one we do have is a 38. Plus, the 19 user scores average a 5.7... Second, I can't find any real reviews of Counterattack – aka Contraataque – but the IMDb rating (never a great proxy, but it's all we have) nets out to 6 out of 10.

From 30 to 60. That is... a remarkably tight band of scoring for ten completely different movies. Literally the only thing that connects those movies beyond their popularity on Netflix are those scores, all right in the mediocre wheelhouse.

Granted, unlike the list five years ago, Netflix didn't actually make all of these films – notably, the two animated movies here: The Secret Lives of Pets 2 and Despicable Me 4 – but they did make most of them. And this follows assurances that quality was going to improve. Overall, maybe it has, but certainly not in this Top 10 list. If anything, these movies are worse than the ones five years ago.

I mean, have you seen The Electric State? It looks like a lot of you have! I saw it too. 30 – the lowest score on the list – is being too generous. It's bad. So bad – and so expensive – that I managed to write 1,500 words a few months ago about why that seemingly doesn't matter for Netflix. As I wrote:

Of course, it wasn’t released in theaters (well, beyond a couple for premieres). Netflix doesn’t do theaters (except when they do). Without a theatrical release, no one can hear your studio head scream. And a movie like this can basically do as well as Netflix wants it to when it comes to its position on the streaming charts, thanks to their all-important algorithms. And so a “bomb” becomes just another bad movie. But while that may be subjective in real life, on Netflix, it’s just another data point, at worst.

And I mean, it may even be doing well for Netflix. But it’s not doing well for me.

Well, it apparently was doing well for Netflix. Well enough to be the seventh most-streamed movie of the first half of the year.

I'm honestly just a little stunned by this list and how closely it reminds me of that list from five years ago. As I wrote back then:

Perhaps it’s the instant-watch capability. Their algorithm. Fewer movies “screened” ahead of time. The always-important element of “new”. Or maybe it’s the “ah what the hell, I’m already paying for this service” aspect. Or just that critical “taste” matters far less in the home. Whatever it is, it’s fascinating that these movies seem to outperform on Netflix, at least for now.

The real risk here is that the audience starts to associate Netflix with mediocre films. It may not matter now — and certainly not right now, in the time of COVID. But down the line, if the audience can’t trust that what Netflix is putting in front of them is good, they’ll lose faith.

I'd like to believe that remains a risk – and why Netflix has said they were going to focus on higher quality content going forward (and they're not alone). But again, just look at the list. The situation hasn't changed and it hasn't mattered. Netflix is a $500B company perhaps on their way to being the first $1T media titan.

Maybe the masses just gravitate towards mediocre movies.¹ But if that's the case, Apple would be the biggest studio in the world right now! Instead, it took them making an actually good movie – albeit for far too much money – to actually get the masses interested. You know, how it should work! Except not for Netflix. Clearly.