The marquee announcement today is the long-awaited return of Lupin to the Netflix queues, with the third round of episodes set to put us back in the shoes of Assane Diop as he fights tooth and nail to restart a life with his family after making a few too many vengeful enemies.
Elsewhere, Netflix is serving up some routine whiplash in the decision-making department, as a smart move from the marketing team clashes with the inevitable failure of a gimmick that didn’t work the first several times.
Lupin: Part 3 hits Netflix next month
Lupin fans aren’t exactly used to long waits, with the first two batches of episodes from the Omar Sy-led crime thriller series having dropped just six months apart from each other back in 2021, so two years must have felt like more of an eternity than usual.
But good things come to those who wait, and anyone familiar with Lupin knows that the French series is over-qualified as a “good thing.” All that’s left to do now is kick back and wait for that sweet October 5 release date.
After Choose Love, it’s time for Netflix to put the choose-your-own-adventure gimmick to bed
A quick history lesson for you all: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch sucked, and so did Kaleidoscope. It’s absolutely no surprise, then, that Choose Love — the latest result of Netflix’s interactive narrative experiment — fell flat on all fronts.
Indeed, below-target viewership numbers and a loveless 18 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes will hopefully make this shallow rom-com be the final nail in the coffin for this endeavor, at least until Netflix brushes up on how to tell these stories better.
An action thriller doing well on the charts is nothing special…
…but an action thriller that’s actually decent? Talk about groundbreaking.
It’s even more impressive when you consider that the film in question — The Italian Job — is an American remake of the popular 1969 film of the same name. Together, that creates the almost-mythical result of an actually-good American remake of a classic action thriller that’s somehow also also breaking into Top 10 territory — the natural habitat of the genre’s biggest stinkers — in more than a few of Netflix’s markets at the moment. Indeed, we may never see something like this again.
Everything Now isn’t the catchiest title in the world, but Netflix wasn’t taking any chances with the alternative
When the production company behind The Crown and Who Is Erin Carter? approach you with a brand-new show, it’s probably wise to just let them do their thing and wait for those sweet reviews and returns to start pouring in.
But, while the same can’t be said about the whole company, Netflix’s marketing team knows a thing or two about good decisions, and changing the title of said upcoming show from The F*ck-It Bucket to Everything Now was probably one such decision.
As alluded to earlier, the teen dramedy series comes from a tried-and-true home, and with less than a month until the show’s release, flexibility in marketing just might be key.
Published: Sep 6, 2023 07:00 pm