Dan Lin has only been in the new Netflix film chief role for a little over a week, but he’s already making his mark.
Netflix has under gone a reorg under Lin, who took over on April 1 from Scott Stuber, and the existing executives on the feature film team will now be divided based on genre, IndieWire has learned. Each of the different film team leaders will split up a few genres a piece.
Here’s how it breaks down: Ori Marmur gets action, fantasy, horror, and sci-fi movies. Kira Goldberg gets thrillers, dramas, and family films. Niija Kuykendall gets faith-based, young adult, and holiday movies, and Jason Young gets comedies and rom-coms. As a result of the changes, about a dozen individuals from the film team are being laid off, which isn’t uncommon when a new boss comes in.
How does this structure differ from what came before? Before the split was based on budget, not genre. Execs Tendo Nagenda and Lisa Nishimura previously handled low-to-mid budget movies, acquisitions, and documentaries, and everything else that was mid-to-high budget rolled up to other executives and Stuber. Nagenda exited in September 2022, and Nishimura exited in March 2023.
That tended to be confusing across Hollywood. Multiple folks had greenlight power and oversight, making it hard to know to whom to pitch projects. After their exit, Netflix streamlined its film team with everything rolling up to Marmur, Goldberg, and Kuykendall.
In the old model, if Netflix had a handful of action movies (of which there are many), you’d have multiple teams tackling films of various budgets. Now there’s (hopefully) tighter alignment such that one individual’s team can craft a vision for its programming around a given genre. Even though Lin has only been in the job a week, he’s been talking about this new way of organizing things with content chief Bela Bajaria for about a month.
We’ll see just what all this means for the types of movies Netflix puts out under Lin (Netflix declined to comment). Bajaria has already said the streamer can’t afford to define itself narrowly. Lin, who has made his bread and butter with franchises like “The Lego Movie,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “Godzilla vs. Kong,” and Netflix’s own live-action “Avatar: The Last Airbender” series, may chase more of those types of films over prestige movies that Stuber valued or some of the most expensive tentpoles like “Red Notice” or “The Gray Man” that haven’t yet spawned sequels.
THR first reported the news of the reorg.
