Netflix’s multi-year deal with Skydance Animation, which shifted over from Apple TV+, “helps complement the work that we’re doing” with original animated fare, Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said.
Partnering with third parties across the board “really helps us” to “keep up that scale as we grow,” the exec said on the company’s third-quarter earnings interview. Animation as a subset of the overall content mix has been an increasing priority in recent years, with co-founder and Executive Chairman Reed Hastings first publicly calling attention to it when he was running Netflix as CEO. Alluding to Disney, Hastings said in 2021 that execs were “very fired up about catching them in family animation, maybe eventually passing them, we’ll see.”
Hastings and Sarandos, however, have both conceded that everything in the animation business moves at a more deliberate pace than the rest of their operation. That’s where plugging in Skydance’s pipeline could provide a boost. As Deadline first reported, Skydance and Apple decided to part ways in animation due to strategic differences, with Skydance retaining control of the film Spellbound. It will premiere on Netflix in 2024, followed by Pookoo in 2025.
“It’s a very long cycle of development and production,” Sarandos said. “Sometimes it can take a decade to deliver a really great animated feature film. And as you know, we move pretty fast. … No single company has really launched more than two animated features in the same year.”
Across the entertainment landscape, “there’s a ton of appetite,” Sarandos said. “If you look at the Top 10 features since Nielsen has been tracking movie watching, seven of them are animated features. We’re committed to that part of the business, and we do that through a combination of licensing, partnerships and original production.”
Netflix recently released Nimona and is about to debut Aardman Animation’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and the Adam Sandler-voiced Leo.
Skydance Animation, whose marquee feature for Apple was Luck in summer 2022, is run by former Pixar and Disney animation chief John Lasseter.