« Where someone picks a fight with us, that gets a lot of attention, » Reed Hastings says.
Netflix is happy to defend its straight-to-streaming movies against the global film industry when necessary, CEO Reed Hastings said Wednesday.
« We don’t really want a fight with anyone, » Hasting said in an interview at the Code Conference on Wednesday. « What we’re trying to do is have great movies and have them be shown everywhere. But where someone picks a fight with us, that gets a lot of attention… it’s been fantastic for us. »
« Sometimes the establishment is clumsy and they try to shut out the insurgent and then the insurgent role is to try to play that up, » he said.
The comment came after Netflix clashed with the Federation of French Cinemas earlier this month about premiering two of its movies at the Cannes Film Festival.
Netflix’s monster movie » Okja » and Noah Baumbach’s « The Meyerowitz Stories » were allowed to enter the festival despite protests from French distributors, who said it violated a French law that requires distributors to wait for 36 months after a theatrical release before making them available on streaming platforms.
In response, Hastings posted on Facebook: « The establishment closing ranks against us. See Okja on Netflix June 28th. Amazing film that theatre chains want to block us from entering into Cannes film festival competition. »
Still, the festival issued a rule that prevents straight-to-streaming films in 2018.
—The Associated Press contributed to this report.
