Did Netflix save Hollywood? The director of Conclave thinks so
Edward Berger made his name on a Netflix war film and his Oscar winner in theaters. His answer cuts both ways, and so does his timing.
Yes — that's Edward Berger's actual position, delivered in a fireside chat at the MIA Market in Rome and reported by The Hollywood Reporter under the quote itself: "The movie industry needed Netflix to wake up." In his telling, the streamer's disruption shook a complacent business — and now the influence flows the other way, with streamers learning from theatrical as the box office rebounds.
He has standing to make both halves of that argument. All Quiet on the Western Front won Netflix four Oscars in 2023, and Berger was blunt about the debt at a UK exhibitors' conference in March, per Screen Daily:
"There's nowhere could have made All Quiet but Netflix, at that time."
— Edward Berger
At the same event he said the opposite about his Oscar-winning Conclave, a slow-burn that lived on patience and theatrical word of mouth: it "might have very well disappeared on Netflix," because "you need to lock people in the cinema to watch it."
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The timing is doing half the talking
Berger's Rome remarks landed in the worst possible week to sound triumphant about streaming. On October 14, Netflix cut about 1,000 jobs — six percent of its workforce, the biggest reduction since 2022, with slowing engagement growth cited in the reporting. The company reports third-quarter earnings this week, with Wall Street watching those same engagement numbers.
Netflix laid off 1,000 people on October 14. Five days later, its most decorated director was in Rome explaining what Hollywood owes it.
Berger is the experiment
What makes him the right person to ask is that his own career is currently running the A/B test. His next film, The Ballad of a Small Player with Colin Farrell, is the first under his company's first-look deal with Netflix — and it went into theaters on October 15 before its Netflix debut on October 29, exactly the hybrid release his "pendulum" argument describes.
So the director answers his own question both ways. Netflix woke the industry up and bankrolled the film nobody else would touch; theaters saved the one that needed patience; and the filmmaker who benefited from both is structuring his releases to keep both. Where audiences watch the next Conclave won't be decided by a panel in Rome — but it says something that the man with a Netflix deal keeps insisting on a cinema window first.
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