If you think that there is apparently no one who does not have a Netflix account or who has not seen “squid game”, there are about 1.4 billion people in China who have not registered, and the co-PDG of Streamer Ted Sarandos is very good with that.
In a conversation with Semafor as the World Economy Summit in Washington on Wednesday, April 23, Sarandos said he spent years taking care of taking a foothold in China at a time when everyone in Hollywood thought it was the only way to succeed or reach a billion dollars at the box office. In fact, although there was a period when the Chinese box office was a real gold mine for certain films that have succeeded in the test, it has largely become less a factor for many American films.
Sarandos revealed that all these efforts did not do it anywhere.
“Fifteen years ago, everyone thought it was existential. You had to go to China,” said Sarandos. “For us, I took a few years to try to do it.”
Sarandos explained that Netflix had concluded an agreement with a third -party company that would give them a license to operate in China and not be blocked on the Internet. And there is a reason why he did not go much further than that.
“The content had to erase the censorship council to get to the air, and in three years, no episode of a Netflix program released the censorship. Not one,” said Sarandos.
It turns out that the Chinese government is not exactly delighted with a direct Western society to consumers operating within their borders.
“They had no interest in the United States in China,” he said. “I watched everyone spend the next decade to grind all his time to enter China and finally ended up in the same place as me, which was nowhere.”
Sarandos then boasted that it is one of the “rare companies in the United States” without exposure to China, its censorship, its taxes or prices (president of the Trump wink).
“There is a large company in the rest of the world which is happy to welcome Netflix,” he said.
In fact, the rates remark did not come by accident. Sarandos was invited to know why Hollywood is no longer attracting attention as an industry for his efforts to ensure jobs in the United States, to which Sarandos said that the entertainment industry was “neglected”.
“It is easy to forget, Netflix alone, I think that from 2020 to 2024, contributed $ 125 billion to the American economy, created 140,000 production jobs, 500 jobs, we have shot films or a television in the 50 states. The share of the lion of our investment is in the United States,” he said. “But I think it is neglected as an industrial. We are sort of thrown under the bus in the trade agreements. People forget that it is a real deal. You almost never see an in office photographed on a studio.”
He gave an example of building a billion dollars production installation in Mexico in which he was joined by the president of Mexico during the disclosure. Netflix has built its own installation in New Jersey recently, but Sarandos made the comparison that if a company was building a billion dollars factory that makes cars, someone would probably be there for a photo of the photo.
To recall, before President Trump announced (then canceled) his massive prices on a large part of the world, he had appointed Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight to be his “eyes and ears” as “special ambassadors” in Hollywood and prevent him from losing affairs in foreign countries. But in what should be a surprise for anyone, Los Angeles Times this week reported that the group of ambassadors had made no announcements on specific priorities or objectives and has practically no contact with community leaders who seek to bring production jobs to Los Angeles or elsewhere in the United States.
At least Sarandos does his part.
