Casual Viewing | Will Tavlin
www.nplusonemag.com
A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer meant fewer shipping costs for Netflix, and fewer DVDs for the company to manage and store. Netflix tracked heavy users of its service — labeling them internally as “pigs” — and secretly throttled their deliveries. It didn’t matter if Netflix rented fewer DVDs than Blockbuster, because the company would keep collecting its monthly fee. The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was this: Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.

Until recently no Hollywood studio had ever released two movies with the same name at the same time. At most studios, such a strategy would be unthinkable. Audiences might accidentally buy tickets to the wrong film, and the PR fallout would be disastrous: snipes from trade-magazine writers; angry calls from investors questioning the studios’ business acumen; angrier calls from agents demanding to know why their clients’ images were being intentionally sabotaged.

Netflix, however, is not most studios. On April Fools’ Day, 2022, the company released a Judd Apatow comedy titled The Bubble, which takes place on the set of a Hollywood dinosaur franchise that’s forced to quarantine in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Four weeks later, it released an animated film by Tetsurō Araki, director of the popular Japanese anime shows Death Note and Attack on Titan, about a postapocalyptic world in which the law of gravity ceases to exist. Araki’s film was called Bubble.