news culture Huge flop for this $100M Netflix film. The bill is salty!
There are winning bets and others that can have serious consequences. Launching projects in all directions, video-on-demand platform Netflix has just paid the price. Despite a pretty solid cast and an interesting story on paper, the White Noise film was a real flop. And it could hurt the streaming giant’s wallet.
100 million dollars! This is the estimated budget of White Noise, the adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel. Despite the presence in front of the camera of Adam Driver, Don Cheadle and one of the former greats of independent cinema, the feature film has taken a real beating from audiences since its release.
A very expensive hoax at the expense of a naïve, wallet-ready Netflix with a desire to fish for unsuspecting intellectuals.
It’s sober, direct and that says a lot about this film that doesn’t have an uninteresting plot. Burlesque in its approach, White Noise paints a portrait of the modern American family. As a satire à la Simpson, the work shows the everyday life of parents and children who try to cope with the conflicts of life as best they can. Everything goes wrong when the father, a university professor, and his family are confronted with a chemical leak that releases a toxic cloud.
White Noise or the pharaonic budget film that flopped
Bathed in a mixture of apocalyptic absurdity, White Noise could have been a comfortable independent film, but its staid side and the director’s approach to Marriage Story were enough to leave viewers unmoved. With 29.09 million viewing hours on the bar in ten days, White Noise fares worse than the film Blonde, which had 37.74 million viewing hours. It is interesting to note that the feature film won over most critics from newspapers, sites and trade journals, but left others behind.
And like the latter, viewers — in the vast majority — didn’t support Noah Baumbach’s proposal at all. Despite an estimated first hour, an acclaimed staging and wonderfully kitschy 80s clichés, White Noise is considered too long-winded, too garrulous and its hybrid side between social satire and apocalyptic scenes just doesn’t convince. Unfortunately, it’s one of Netflix’s biggest failures to date. Some will say it’s a misunderstood film, but the reality is there and it’s certain that the (bad) word of mouth isn’t enough to increase viewers’ appreciation of this work of art. At $100 million, Netflix’s upper echelons still have to wonder why they chose such a risky project.