You know how these days there’s a superhero movie coming out almost every other month? Well, in the 90s (and beginning of the 00s) there were romantic comedies. Pretty woman, How to lose a guy in 10 days, The Notebook, My best friends’ wedding, 50 First Dates, Sabrina, and the list goes on.
We all loved watching them, they were an easy and fun way to spend time. For girls, especially, it triggered their imagination, creating high expectations that some (well, let’s face it) most men couldn’t reach.
Eventually the “boy meets girl, they realize they can’t be together, but in the end they marry” storyline got old and people stop watching them, therefore Hollywood stopped making them.
Time passed and, although everyone is more social now because of Facebook, Instagram & Tinder, people seem to want to spend more time alone (the reason why, could and should be discussed in a different article).
Netflix is one of the main reasons why people want to stay at home and not go out. I mean, I get it: why make the effort of dressing up and then spend so much money when I could stay at home, maybe order a pizza and watch films in my PJs, being comfortable and quiet.
When Netflix started, it seemed like a bad idea. Pay to get movies we could easily find on torrent or to watch online? Who would do that? Their winning strategy proved to be creating new, original content: I think the first TV show that got popular was Marco Polo. Then followed Orange is the new black, House of Cards….and the rest is history. Now they’re producing so much new content that I can’t keep up…and I don’t think I want to, considering some thinkr Netflix is the graveyard of bad or worst reviewed films (why spend tens of millions and see it tank on cinema? spend maximum 10, put it on Netflix and get at least some money, compared to no money from box office). I personally think there is a great mix of good and bad on Netflix: all time hits and no name films. I also love the way you navigate Netflix and their filters, it makes discovering movies and TV shows much easier.
Now, I work in Online Marketing, so keywords such as personalization, customer journey, upsell, cross-sell, are familiar to me, and guess what, that’s exactly what Netflix is doing. It is gathering data about us, what we watch, what we click on, what we put in our wishlists, and then using it, not only to give us personalized movie recommendations, but also to create original content based on it. Smart, isn’t it? And they’re not the only ones: if you’re wondering why Facebook knows exactly what are you interested in, well, this is why. Future of advertising, people.
That being said, let’s get back to romantic comedies. If people nowadays don’t spend money on going to the cinema, that doesn’t mean they don’t watch them anymore. Let’s be honest: you’ve probably watched The Notebook at least 5 times over the years (me, personally, I’m a Dirty Dancing die-hard fan). You would probably watch it a 6th time, if you didn’t feel like watching anything new, but still have the need to stay at home, in front of the TV. That’s where Netflix got smart.
Besides the usual all time hits that people watch (see the list above), there is so much potential for easy rom-coms to watch at the end of the long day. That’s why they are starting to create original content for this type of audience….and it’s working.
Take Kissing Booth, for example: Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos said in June that the service’s teenage romantic comedy is “one of the most-watched movies in the country, and maybe in the world.” Now, I’ve watched it and it’s pretty cliche: young girl falls in love with older guy, who is a bad boy (a whole other topic we need to talk about in detail, it’s on my list). Intrigue arrives, but it all ends well. Of course it does, that’s the beauty of it, and even if I realized it was lame, I still enjoyed watching it and swooning over the bad boy.
Another example is “Set it up“; now, this one I really liked. Cool storyline, funny, not overly cliche-ic, and the actors are relatable. This is actually an example of good content from Netflix (unlike Christmas Carol, which I haven’t seen, but didn’t need to, considering the trailer for it).
So the trend now is Romantic Comedies. And that’s exactly what Netflix will be serving us!
What do you think about it? Excited about it? do you like rom-coms? What’s your favorite rom-com?