The movie’s hardly an easy sell: It’s a sometimes quiet, sometimes harrowing 135-minute drama featuring zero movie stars and lots of subtitles. In an era when there are tens of thousands of hours of competing Stuff I Gotta Watch(™), simply throwing Roma at the top of an on-screen menu isn’t going to convince skeptics to bump it to the top of their queue.Īnd it doesn’t help Roma. It doesn’t help potential Netflix-partnering filmmakers, who are used to having some sort of economic-driven metric with which to judge a film’s performance-and who may not trust Netflix’s “Everyone’s gonna see it!” promise. And besides, what’s the point of pushing these movies into theaters-where they’re competing with traditional studio films-if the company is just going to keep the results a secret? It certainly doesn’t Netflix, whose potential bragging rights will always come affixed with an asterisk. But in a year in which it’s become clear that no one should take any tech company at its word, the practice feels like a shady bit of narrative-steering. Instead, Netflix occasionally leaks opening-weekend figures to reporters, who can’t independently verify their accuracy.Ī few years ago, such murkiness would have played into Netflix’s effort to present itself as a scrappy, rules-flaunting industry outsider. That’s because Netflix’s release plan consists of “four-walling,” or renting each screen the movie plays on while the studio (in this case, Netflix) keeps all the revenue from each screening, it more importantly means that the company doesn’t have to release box office results. And with the exception of Beasts of No Nation-the 2015 drama that Netflix hoped would be a major awards player-the company has never reported its theatrical grosses, either. Netflix famously never reveals its streaming figures.
Yet the company’s handling of Roma has also been marred by confusion, switcheroos, and a typical (and typically maddening) Silicon Valley opacity that basically comes down to, “Trust us, we know what we’re doing.” With the film finally on Netflix-and in (some) theaters-here are a few takeaways from its strange months-long trajectory. If the strategy works, Netflix could very well adapt it for some of its forthcoming prestige films, such as Martin Scorsese's crime epic The Irishman, or the Steven Soderbergh-directed Panama Papers thriller The Laundromat. The unspoken hope, of course, is that the greater awareness will help the company forge a path leading Roma’ straight to the Academy Awards. And there’s never been a movie released quite like Roma, which the streamer has put in nearly 600 theaters worldwide-the mightiest big-screen run for any Netflix film yet. There’s never been a movie quite like Netflix’s Roma, writer-director Alfonso Cuarón’s gorgeous, deeply immersive black-and-white drama about a young woman in 1970s Mexico.