The streaming service may have been canceling a lot more shows than usual this year in an attempt to cut costs, especially with increased budgetary concerns in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic leading to I Am Not Okay With This, The Society and GLOW all being axed despite having already been renewed for further seasons, but it would appear that Netflix aren’t giving up on their plans for world domination.
As well as once again reaffirming their desire to have an in-house franchise of their own that can rival the cultural pulling power of a Star Wars or Harry Potter, the company have pledged to release even more original content than ever before next year, even though they’ve shelled out close to $20 billion on creating their own exclusive lineup of movies and TV shows in 2020.
The next step in the master plan is to rival animation powerhouses like Disney, Pixar, Illumination and DreamWorks, as CEO Ted Sarandos revealed in a recent interview that Netflix are planning to put out six original animated titles on an annual basis, which sounds like a massive undertaking.
“Our animation ambition right now is not just to step up and be as big as someone who’s doing it today, we’re on a path to be releasing six animated features a year, which no major studio has ever done, on top of the very healthy slate of animated series. The way we think about those things is not to say, ‘Well, how do we do it like someone else has done it?’. Because no one’s ever really done most of these functions at the scale that we’re doing, and the only way you could do that is to have a really trusted team, who will make decisions and take them seriously and own them.”
Animation is one of the most time consuming genres out there, with each frame having to be painstakingly rendered by an army of artists, and there’s a reason why so many high-profile Pixar movies often find themselves mired in creative turmoil as the process constantly changes and evolves throughout production.
Very few major studios even release two or three animated films per year, so claiming that they’re going to churn out half a dozen is a very ambitious statement of intent, but we know much better at this point than to rule Netflix out when it comes to anything.