The endless Netflix scroll…
…might be getting slightly shorter. Data from What's On Netflix, analyzed by Bloomberg, revealed that Netflix released ~130 fewer original programs in 2023 than the previous year, a 16% decline — contributing to the last 3 months being Netflix's lightest slate of new releases in 5 years.
After its first foray into original content, with the splashy release of House of Cards in 2011, Netflix spent much of the next decade pumping nearly every spare dollar it had into new TV shows, movies, and documentaries. This investment yielded global hits like Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Bridgerton — as well as a host of forgettable flops — with the streamer’s content spending peaking in late 2021, when it parted with $4.8 billion in a single quarter to win over increasingly flighty subscribers. That's equivalent to $52.6 million in content spending every single day.
Since then, however, Netflix has tightened its purse strings, spending just $3.2 billion in its most recent quarter. With Disney, Paramount, HBO, Peacock, and others all competing to fund that next smash hit, Netflix has shifted to a mantra of “quality over quantity” — a far cry from its 2020 strategy of making a new movie every week.
