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There’s no harm in wanting to be the best, upset the established order, and become the new top dog in a medium that’s been ruled by one company above all others for as long as anybody can remember, but the timing of Netflix stepping in to partner up with Skydance Animation following the dissolution of its deal with Apple is nothing if not suspect.
After all, it was quite literally last week that the streaming service announced it would be restructuring the department, which included the shelving of two original feature films and job losses, hardly ideal considering Netflix was coming hot off the back of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, emerging triumphant from a shortlist that also included The Sea Beast.
With that in mind, Redd Hastings exclaiming his enthusiasm at securing a third-party agreement and building the platform’s catalogue of exclusive animated movie comes off as a touch crass given the circumstances, especially when he’s making no bones about the company’s desire to defeat Disney.
“[We’re] very fired up about catching them in family animation, maybe eventually passing them, we’ll see.”
Firing your own in-house animators and scrapping projects that had been developed at Netflix from the ground up doesn’t seem to be the best way of going about it, but from a business perspective it’s inarguably easier for the streamer to pick up the likes of its freshly-acquired and star-studded Spellbound than investing larger sums of cash into titles that originated from within its own walls.