The founder of Netflix has reaffirmed the streaming service's commitment to dethroning Disney as the go-to destination for family-friendly animation.
"It’s super-impressive what Disney has done," Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings said regarding Disney's success with Disney+. "It’s incredible execution for an incumbent to pivot … so that’s great. And it shows that members are interested and willing to pay more for more content because they’re hungry for great stories." Hastings went on to note that Netflix was "very fired up about catching them in family animation — maybe eventually passing them, we’ll see, a long way to go just to catch them — and maintaining our lead in general entertainment that’s so stimulating."
This is not the first time Netflix's CEOÂ has publicly talked about ambitious plans when it comes to family-friendly fare. "We want to beat Disney in family animation," Hastings recently said. "That's going to take a while. I mean, they are really good at it. We're both very focused on building out our animation group and, you know, it's a friendly competition." He continued, "We both want to do incredible stories for consumers and we want to be able to raise the bar in that area. We know that they will be a challenger and a competitor for the next 50 years."
While it's distributed animated kids movies like The Little Prince in the past, Netflix began developing and relating its own in-house feature-length animated family movies with its Netflix Animation brand. The first title from this was division was Klaus, followed shortly by The Willoughbys and Over the Moon.
Upcoming features from Netflix Animation include the Australian-set musical Back to the Outback, Henry Selick's stop-motion comedy Wendell and Wild and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.
Source: Deadline