news culture Huge flop for this $100 million Netflix movie. The bill is salty!
There are winning bets and others that can have serious consequences. By dint of launching projects in all directions, the video on demand platform, Netflix, has just paid the price. Despite a rather 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! This is the estimated budget of White Noise, the adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel. Despite the presence of Adam Driver, Don Cheadle and one of the former great figures of independent cinema on camera, the feature film has taken a real beating from the public since its release. Journalist Jorge Loser’s criticism is one of the most scathing:
A very expensive joke at the expense of a naive Netflix with the wallet ready to strike, with the desire to fish clueless intellectuals.
It’s sober, direct and that says a lot about this film which does not have an uninteresting plot. Burlesque in its approach, White Noise paints a portrait of the modern American family. A satire à la Simpson, the work depicts the daily life of parents and children trying to manage, as best they can, the conflicts of life. Everything goes wrong when the father, a university professor, and his family find themselves 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 pleasant independent film, but its stuffy side and the approach of the director of Marriage Story was enough to leave the spectators unmoved. With 29.09 million hours of viewing on the counter in ten days, White Noise does worse than the film Blonde and its 37.74 million hours of viewing. What is interesting to observe is that the feature film convinced most of the critics of newspapers, sites and specialized magazines, but left others on the side of the road.
And like the latter, the spectators – for the vast majority of them – did not at all adhere to Noah Baumbach’s proposal. Despite an appreciated first hour, an acclaimed staging and deliciously kitsch 80s clichés, White Noise is considered too long, too talkative and its hybrid side between social satire and apocalyptic scenes simply does not not convinced. Unfortunately, it is one of Netflix’s biggest failures to date. Some will say that it’s a misunderstood film, but the reality is there and it’s a safe bet that the (bad) word of mouth is not enough to raise the esteem of the spectators towards this artwork. At $100 million, Netflix’s upper echelons must still wonder why they signed on to such a risky project.
