How Netflix lost $50 Million

I have a very interesting story for you today about Netflix.

You may have heard this one, giving an unproven director a bunch of money who then punted it on stupid things.

I thought everyone's already covered this, what more is there to say?

But as I looked into it, there is so much more to this story than got told and so I figured you guys might want to know the whole truth of this insane saga.

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It all starts back in 2018 (the “before-time”) and this man is our key character Carl Rinsch - relatively young unproven director and this guy he's known around town as a little bit of a quirky dude, a little bit of a weirdo.

He would tell people that he grew up in Africa and that his father was a spy when it turns out he grew up in Bakersfield and his father was a corporate accountant.

So he muddled along in Hollywood for a few years until eventually he made some well-received commercials.

Eventually he got noticed by some big directors like Ridley Scott and they gave him a chance, they vouched for him.

And so finally Hollywood gave him the money to make his first feature film featuring none other than Keanu Reeves, a movie called 47 Ronin - an original idea from Carl Rinsch that was going to change Hollywood forever.

The only problem was that it was terrible.

Basically universally, critically and commercially panned audiences hated it.

It flopped massively at the box office, losing a large portion of its budget, this doesn't even include marketing budget loss of about $20 million.

If you're a new director and your initial film that you spend $170 million on is a big flop with Keanu Reeves at the helm? People don't really want to trust you anymore.

So Hollywood lets him go and he goes back to directing commercials and that should be the end of the story.

A man got his shot he blew it and that's the end.

…

But real life doesn't quite work like that, real life has a habit of throwing unexpected situations in your face.

For example, in 2020, something shifted in the world and caused a big shift in Hollywood.

Maybe you remember this little thing called Covid?

Where is everybody?

It turns out they are inside streaming more media than ever before.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney, Apple, they're all growing rapidly during Covid and they all need new content quickly.

They're all desperate, they'll buy anything, they just need new series as soon as possible.

So our man Carl Rinsch gets called back up.

You see he's been workshopping around Hollywood his idea for a couple years for a science fiction series called The Organic Intelligent about a genius who invents a human-like specie,s travels around the world and then humans figure out what they are and turn against them.

He wants to call the show White Horse a reference to the first Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

It's sci-fi, it's interesting, it's edgy

Jeff Bezos wants a big show for his Amazon Prime streaming service so he waves around millions of dollars and says we'll take it - whatever idea you've got, we'll fund it.

But this starts a bit of a bidding war and all of a sudden Netflix goes “wait a minute, we don't want our competition getting this clearly great new science fiction series” and so Netflix, at the last minute, before Carl's about to sign the deal with Amazon, hijack the deal.

It's going to be a big deal, they offered him millions, they offered him guaranteed sequel rights, spin-offs and sequels.

That's guaranteed work many years of Carl’s life.

But Carl still isn’t convinced.

So Netflix pull out the Trump card - Final Cut.

Basically, they’ll allow Carl to release the show however he wants, making no edits or haltering any of his creative genius. This is almost never offered to anybody at any OTT platform.

It was a basically a blank cheque.

So they pay him $61.2 million in this contract ensuring him and his wife that they will be locked for life to all subsequent seasons and spin-offs.

Production begins.

Carl works long into the night.

And then Netflix, who again are not hands-on start to hear rumours about what's going on set.

A local film industry union complains that he's mistreating the team, filming on locations in different countries, shouting and cursing and getting excessively irritated.

They hear that he's going days without sleep, that he's walking around the set and saying that his wife is plotting to have him assassinated.

Aren’t all great artists a little insane though?

He says that he has discovered a covid-19 secret transmission mechanism and that he can predict lightning strikes

Then he does the worst thing of all - he asks for more money.

At this point, he's missed several production milestones. Not even the script has been finalised yet.

Furthermore, he tells Netflix that without more money, the whole production will collapse and that they won't get anything at all at which point Netflix gives him $11 million more.

Now what does he do with this $11 million at the height of the pandemic?

He takes that money and reroutes it directly to his personal trading account!

Long story short, he gets really into meme stocks and starts dumping all of this money into weird risky stock options and over the course of a few weeks

Its Over

He loses $6 million in a few weeks of Netflix's money that he begged for.

But the story doesn’t end there.

He takes the last $4 million left in his account and buys Dogecoin.

$4 million of Dogecoin.

And what happens?

Dogecoin goes to the moon!

All of a sudden, he has turned $4 million to $27 million!

He now has more money than he ever could have asked for, now he can finally finish the show right?

No, instead he takes that money and buys five Rolls-Royces immediately but that's not enough cars.

So he also buys a Ferrari and a $400,000 watch alongside expensive furniture and designer clothing.

The insane ending to this story is that Netflix wrote such a haphazard contract to Carl that he’s actually suing Netflix for $4 million more for not letting him finish the show!