‘War Machine’ Has Been a Minor Hit — and Netflix Needs Minor Hits

The conversations around Netflix properties are usually about characters and storylines, critical reception, social media, the exhaustion of binging them, Michael Kelly in a bubble bath, and hand-wringing about the fact that Netflix is likely never going to tell us how many of its 100 million worldwide subscribers watch them.

Is Stranger Things a hit? Probably. People certainly will not shut up about it. Is Marvel’s Iron Fist a hit? Probably. The reviews were really bad — among the worst Netflix has ever gotten for an original series — but Iron Fist is really just a season of Netflix’s massively popular multi-series Marvel franchise. Is The Exotics a hit? Probably not. Netflix has so many shows that it has likely gotten lost in the shuffle. (Also, The Exotics isn’t a show. I made that one up.)

Which brings me to War Machine, the satirical Afghanistan War film starring Brad Pitt as a grunting, cartoonish U.S. military commander that premiered May 26 to decidedly meh reviews and then seemed (to me anyway) to disappear without a trace.

But Brad Pitt is a movie star and War Machine premiered on Netflix without the usual 90-day window for a theatrical release or weeks of waiting for it to drop from $15 to $5 on VOD. People watched it, right? Netflix won’t say, of course, but the answer is likely that it was a minor hit — bigger than, say, Dear White People or Girlboss but nothing close to a tsunami like 13 Reasons Why.

Who does Netflix have to put in a movie to get someone to notice it these days? George Clooney?

“When Netflix started doing originals, House of Cards generated a lot of buzz,” says Alan Wolk, lead analyst for the streaming business site TV[R]EV. “The whole season came out at once. It had Kevin Spacey. It was a big deal. Now it’s commonplace for Netflix to release something big.”

Wolk said that Netflix’s business model — 100 million subscribers paying a monthly fee to watch whatever and as much Netflix programming as they want — means that a Netflix TV show or movie has value even if viewers aren’t watching it. “HBO never has more than two or three originals running at a time,” Wolk says, “but people come back to things on Netflix that they may have missed.”

That business model also means Netflix is more focused on subscribers coming back month after month than maximizing awareness for every TV show and film. Having a movie star in a Netflix original is prestigious for Netflix, may put Netflix in this year’s Oscar race (though likely not with this film), and reminds subscribers and potential subscribers that Netflix is doing big things.

The Evidence

Even though Netflix doesn’t provide viewing data, War Machine has definitely made an impact based on an analysis of Google Trends data.

Internet searches are not the only measure of how interested people are in a particular subject, but Google Trends provides enough granularity of Google search metrics to get an apples-to-apples comparison of two or more things over a particular period of time. That’s particularly handy for looking at popular engagement on something like Netflix movies and TV shows, which don’t have box office revenues like theatrical films or Nielsen ratings like broadcast, cable and premium TV shows.

One way to consider War Machine‘s impact is to compare it to the two theatrical films — Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Baywatch — that opened on the same day (May 26) as War Machine and look at how much attention those three films drove in the United States relative to each other during the week before and the week after the release date.

War Machine is in blue on these charts.

Over the two-week period, Pirates of the Caribbean generated 5.5 times as many searches as War Machine, and Baywatch generated 3.5 times as many as War Machine. There wasn’t just one movie that got considerably more engagement than War Machine during that period; there were two.

OK, so maybe a pair summer blockbuster movies isn’t a fair comparison with a cerebral satire about the Afghanistan War. Maybe a better comparison would be something like Bloodline, the Kyle Chandler drama series that premiered its third season on the same day as War Machine. Surely a Netflix original Brad Pitt movie could generate more interest than a dark, dreary and already-cancelled drama series on the same streaming service, right?

Surprisingly, no. Bloodline generated considerably more interest than War Machine in the week leading up to the premiere and days following. War Machine only generated more search traffic than Bloodline during a four-day period beginning with the premiere date.

So, maybe Bloodline is a sleeper hit with lots of closet fans who search for theories and Kyle Chandler photos but carefully avoid talking about the show in public. Maybe to get a clearer sense of War Machine‘s place in the Netflix firmament, you need to compare it to other recent Netflix premieres like Master of None and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This chart begins on the day Master of None Season 2 premiered (May 12), continues through Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (May 19) and War Machine (May 26) and ends a week later.

Master of None and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt both have peaks around their premieres, but War Machine has a much bigger peak around its premiere. Averaged across the four-week period, though, War Machine generates only marginally more searches than Master of None.

Considering the big spike of interest around War Machine‘s premiere date, maybe Netflix original films are more like feature films that generate focused attention around their premieres but just don’t generate as much interest over time as TV shows. Maybe we need a few more comparisons to see how big War Machine really is. This chart begins in March and includes Netflix’s four most popular properties to premiere so far this year.

The results are interesting and varied. Marvel’s Iron Fist drove a staggering amount of search traffic around its premiere that tailed off substantially over the next two weeks. Thirteen Reasons Why hit a peak around its March 31 premiere, soared even higher over the next week as it drove a national discussion about teen suicide, and drove more than twice the search traffic as Marvel’s Iron Fist over this period.

House of Cards, Bloodline and War Machine have had similar trajectories — popping around their premieres, sustaining for a few days and then trailing off. Even though House of Cards drove twice as much search traffic at its peak as either Bloodline or War Machine at their peaks, it’s important to keep in mind how much more attention all of those properties have driven than some of Netflix’s other premieres this year.

Here’s a comparison of War Machine with several Netflix series that have premiered over the last few months.

Even though it premiered near the end of the period, War Machine made a bigger splash and has driven more overall search traffic over the last few months than Master of None, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Dear White People or Girlboss. If search traffic is a fair comparison to viewing — and only Netflix knows the answer to that — than War Machine has been closer to a hit than a flop.

The Big Picture

Netflix isn’t a network like NBC or HBO that puts a lot of marketing into a project, premieres it on a date certain and hopes you watch it. Netflix is a database with thousands of hours of programming, an algorithm-driven interface that shows you things you’re likely to enjoy watching, and a programming philosophy that the Netflix tent should be big enough for Fuller House and Chef’s Table.

Netflix also isn’t a movie studio. Where Paramount or Disney may spend as much marketing a film — on billboards, TV spots, digital advertising, etc. — as it does making it, Netflix’s marketing spend on War Machine was likely nowhere close to that ratio. Netflix has reported that its marketing budget this year is only about one-sixth of its programming budget, and talent agents have complained off the record to Variety and to the Wall Street Journal that their clients are not getting the same exposure for Netflix projects as they do for other distributors.

Instead, Netflix is a subscription business whose the goal is to retain its 100 million worldwide subscribers and continuing growing incrementally. Netflix has grown from premiering House of Cards in 2013 to announcing more than 1,000 hours of original programming for this year, from 33 million to 100 million streaming subscribers, from a $6 billion to a $72 billion market valuation, and is now available in more than 190 countries — essentially everywhere in the world except China, North Korea and Syria.

In 2011 when Netflix made the decision to get into original programming, that meant committing $100 million to produce two seasons of House of Cards and show the world it was entering the TV business at the top. Two years later, the series premiered to great reviews and earned nine Emmy nominations. This year, the company will spend $6 billion on original and licensed programming.

With its $60 million production budget, War Machine represents roughly 1 percent of Netflix’s annual programming budget. Rather than spend many millions more marketing the film like it’s opening on 4,000 theater screens, Netflix is investing for the long haul by focusing on subscriber growth. That means expanding Netflix to platforms like Comcast’s Xfinity X1, making originals shows in more of its foreign territories, and spending money on R&D to design recommendations algorithms and user interfaces to help you figure out what to watch next.

And considering Netflix’s big and expanding catalog of original and licensed programming, War Machine — like almost everything on Netflix — will be a grain of sand in the hundreds of millions of hours its subscribers will watch this year. In baseball terminology, if Marvel’s Iron Fist is a home run and Girlboss is a single, War Machine is a double (if that). But Netflix needs doubles — lots of doubles — and singles and triples and home runs.

That’s not to say that Netflix is taking its eye off quality or spending lavishly on projects simply because it can. In recent weeks, Netflix has cancelled big-budget shows like The Get Down and Sense8 because they weren’t worth the return on investment. Netflix didn’t cancel those two shows to save money. The programming budget for 2018 will be even bigger than this year’s budget. Netflix cancelled those shows to spend the money on projects it hopes will generate a better return on investment to continue restocking its catalog.

If you’re not up for War Machine, that’s fine with Netflix. Just scroll to the next thing on your list.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

Stream War Machine on Netflix