When Netflix informed its shareholders this week that it signed up 5.2 million subscribers in the second quarter of this year, there were several ways to look at that. Two years ago, it signed up 1.7 million for the second quarter, so the growth in 24 months has been impressive. In the same quarter a year ago, it also signed up 5.2 million subscribers. In that light, it maintained its progress.
But compared with the previous two fiscal quarters, 5.2 million is a big drop. By comparison, in the first quarter of this year, it signed up 7.4 million subscribers.
And the 5.2 million number is also well below the company’s projection of 6.2 million subscribers for the quarter. In fact, the company has never fallen this far short of a quarterly subscription target.
Any number of reasons could be at play here, but one that can’t be ignored was the announcement in May that Netflix has entered into a multi-year deal with former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama to “produce films and series for Netflix, potentially including scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries, and features,” according to a company statement.
It’s not necessarily a surprise that Netflix sought out the Obamas. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, and said voters should elect Clinton because “Trump would destroy much of what is great about America.”
“Hillary Clinton is the strong leader we need, and it’s important that Trump lose by a landslide to reject what he stands for,” Hastings said at the time.
Add the fact that Netflix is home to Michelle Wolf’s weekly “comedy” show and conservatives have another reason to snub Netflix. If you didn’t know Wolf before her out-of-line attacks on Vice President Mike Pence and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, you may know her now for her infamous “Salute to Abortion” on her program earlier this month. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Argentinian movie director Diego Kaplan is defending his erotic thriller, Desire, after the film was accused of containing child pornography.
In a scene of the movie, a pre-teenaged girl is shown accidentally discovering how to masturbate and achieve orgasm while watching a cowboy movie and pretending to ride an oversized pillow as if it were a horse.
But Diego Kaplan is defending the film as fantasy, not reality.
“Despair is a film. When we see a shark eating a woman on film, no one thinks the woman really died or that the shark was real,” he said in a statement released on June 29. “We work in a world of fiction; and, for me, before being a director comes being a father.”
“Of course, this scene was filmed using a trick, which was that the girls were copying a cowboy scene from a film by John Ford. The girls never understood what they were doing, they were just copying what they were seeing on the screen. No adult interacted with the girls, other than the child acting coach. Everything was done under the careful surveillance of the girls’ mothers. Because I knew this scene might cause some controversy at some point, there is “Making Of” footage of the filming of the entire scene.
Everything works inside the spectators’ heads, and how you think this scene was filmed will depend on your level of depravity.”– READ MORE
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