When Dan Lin, the chairman of Netflix’s film division, read the script for a survival thriller set in the remote wilderness of Australia, he thought it was obvious who should play the lead role: Charlize Theron. “Charlize is one of one,” Mr. Lin said. The movie, “Apex,” would feature white-water rafting, venomous snakes, characters plummeting to their deaths from cliffs. “We wanted to make it in a way that the action actually felt real — that you actually felt like you were in the Australian outback,” Mr. Lin said. “She was the only one that could do it.”
Mr. Lin and I were sitting in a sleek conference room at Netflix’s Sunset Boulevard headquarters, where he oversees the industry’s most prolific film studio. We were talking about his approach to making movies, and he had volunteered this story.
For “Apex,” Mr. Lin consulted with Kira Goldberg, one of his deputies. “Kira and I strategized about how do we get Charlize to do it,” he said. “How do we know that the actor that we have is game to make that kind of movie? And so, unlike a traditional Hollywood process where you take someone to The Grill, some fancy restaurant, we took Charlize to the cafeteria here at Netflix.”
“That was the strategy,” I said, a little confused. “Why?”
“The strategy is: Is she game?” Mr. Lin said. “Is she willing to roll up her sleeves and get into it with us?”
I thought it unlikely that Ms. Theron, who spent months in the Namib Desert shooting “Mad Max: Fury Road,” would consider the Netflix salad bar a hardship. Mr. Lin continued, as if he had not said anything strange: “Netflix is such a big company. My goal is to make a big company feel small.”
On that score, he’s succeeded. Not long ago, the film group was run by Scott Stuber, a former vice chairman at Universal, whose charge was to convince Hollywood that Netflix was committed to making every kind of movie imaginable, from extravagant action titles to prestige Oscarbait. Charming and affable in the traditional studio chief way, Mr. Stuber lured Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro and other elite directors with expansive budgets and creative freedom. Talent saw Mr. Stuber as one of the good guys: He fought with his boss, the co-chief executive Ted Sarandos, to give movies theatrical runs and keep a piece of their fading glamour.
Mr. Lin was hired in April 2024 to replace Mr. Stuber and change all that. The streaming wars had ended, and Netflix had won. Hollywood was in the middle of a major consolidation; prestige was on the downward slide. Netflix no longer needed Mr. Stuber’s largess and studio-system pedigree to attract talent — especially when much cheaper podcasts and live programming could keep users on the service with as much success as movies, if not more.
Mr. Lin, who is 53, spent the first part of his career earning respect across Hollywood as an executive and producer behind a long list of successful films, including “The Lego Movie” and “Sherlock Holmes.” But his two years atop Netflix’s film division have made it clear that he is more of an implementer and budget master than a regal statesman. He doesn’t fawn over talent. He doesn’t have a soft touch when telling filmmakers they have to compromise on their vision. He doesn’t even report to Mr. Sarandos: He’s under Bela Bajaria, the chief content officer, who comes from the world of television.
Netflix started out as a tech company, run by ones and zeros. Mr. Stuber was in place to make Hollywood forget that; Mr. Lin is a reversion to the norm. He knows what works on the service and how much each movie should cost, and there is little he’s willing to budge on, no matter how big a star’s Q score is.
At a time when anybody of any wattage is lucky to get a movie made anywhere, it doesn’t matter if an invitation to the corporate cafeteria is slightly daft. Mr. Lin got Ms. Theron. “Apex” premiered on Netflix in April as its No. 1 film, amassing more than 100 million views in its first 30 days.
From the moment he arrived in Hollywood, Mr. Lin has been known for being more cerebral about his projects than passionate. After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Wharton and Harvard Business School, he went to Warner Bros. as an executive in 1999. He was quickly clocked as a rising star and spent the next nine years shepherding films like “The Departed” to the screen.
“I unabashedly say I love the guy,” said his mentor, Alan Horn, who ran Warner Bros. at the time. “We were immediately impressed by him. He’s smart. He’s classy. He was clearly on a path to greater things.”
Mr. Lin left to start his own production companies, which generated a run of high-profile projects including “Aladdin,” “Godzilla vs. Kong,” “It” and “The Two Popes.” He was considered for a job overseeing the DC Comics film empire in 2022, helping to elevate his profile as a major executive when Netflix went looking for someone to succeed Mr. Stuber in 2024.
After joining the streamer, Mr. Lin recalled some advice Mr. Horn had once given him: Always return phone calls, and always tell the truth. In Hollywood, where artifice is standard and egos are fragile, most operators understand that truth is best delivered with finesse. But Mr. Lin takes a straighter approach. “If you talk to anyone in the business, I’m probably the most responsive, most approachable studio chairman there is in town,” he said. “I make my own phone calls. I don’t go through my assistant. You can reach me directly, and you’ll know where I stand.”
Few in Hollywood disagree with that. “He’s a straight shooter,” said Todd Black, the producer behind “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” among other critical and commercial hits. “‘This is the budget number, and you have to figure it out.’ If you can’t figure it out, you go to him. He may help you, or he may not.”
Directors and actors accustomed to Mr. Stuber’s suavity have found Mr. Lin’s style to be a radical change. He’s often described as officious and blunt, and it’s easy to hear stories around town about his awkward bedside manner. It’s harder to get anyone to tell those stories on the record. Mr. Lin directs a staff numbering in the hundreds (including an entire animation studio), and they still greenlight more movies than any other studio by far.
“Listen, I wouldn’t want him to be my doctor if I was having a life-threatening illness,” Liza Chasin, another producer, said. “But I prefer the bluntness. I prefer the honesty, because the BS is exhausting, frankly. I always know where the bar is, because Dan has been clear what the bar is.” The two collaborated on “Ladies First,” a Sacha Baron Cohen comedy that is currently Netflix’s most-watched film, as well as the upcoming titles “The 99’ers” and “The Last Mrs. Parrish.”
Mr. Lin readily acknowledges that he’s still learning on the job. His lack of subtlety, he said, is a byproduct of constantly striving to be honest in a town that doesn’t always see that as a virtue.
“One mistake I made when I first joined the company,” he said, “was that filmmakers always said to me, ‘Please tell me the truth.’ And when I told them the truth, they might not have wanted to hear it. So now I’m learning how to better read people. And if someone tells me they want to hear the truth, I tell it in a way that can be as productive as possible.”
Not long after joining Netflix, Mr. Lin hired Doug Belgrad, a former president of Sony Pictures, as his No. 2. Mr. Belgrad has a reputation for being thoughtful, and for having a noticeably better relationship with talent. “I wanted a right hand that had a lot of experience — frankly, even more experience than I had,” Mr. Lin said. “And I wanted someone that everyone really respects.”
In person, Mr. Lin comes off as earnest and eager, more wide-eyed than sleek, like an avid movie lover who can’t believe he has been given so much power. Programming for an audience of one billion viewers, he has greenlighted 88 movies in his two years at Netflix. That’s down from Mr. Stuber’s pace, but still a staggering level. Mr. Lin’s peers at other studios are authorizing perhaps 12 to 15 movies a year.
“Because I have such a huge slate, my job is very different from other studio chairmen’s jobs,” he said. “I can’t impose my taste on the slate. But I can impose a way of making movies. I can impose a way of how we want to work with filmmakers. I think people on the outside are pretty clear on what I’m going for: making someone’s favorite movie in a specific genre, focusing on variety and quality and making Netflix the best place for filmmakers to work.”
Mr. Lin said he considered himself a “servant leader,” with an objective to elevate those around him. “That’s my mantra,” he said. “That’s what I wake up thinking about every day. How do I create an environment where my filmmakers can succeed? How do I create an environment where my executives can succeed?”
For filmmakers, he has started a number of programs, including a “story trust” where screenwriters working on priority projects can receive feedback from fellow writers during daylong sessions. He hosts “Ask Me Anything” dinners, producer dinners, dinners for directors to talk about artificial intelligence.
For executives, the “servant leader” has been more brusque. Mr. Stuber grouped his people by the budget level of their films, but Mr. Lin reorganized them by genre. Six people with inside knowledge of the company told me that some of his key deputies have felt frustrated and hamstrung into making only a certain type of movie — but none of them have left the streamer.
Mr. Lin’s thinking, which is closer to the way TV shows are produced, made sense. Viewers don’t open the Netflix app and think, “I want to watch something expensively produced”; they pick a story.
He has also told his executives that he expects more hustle. That is, they should not wait for creative agencies to deliver them fully imagined packages, with directors and actors attached; they should find more material themselves and actively develop those projects in house.
Mr. Lin’s instructions at Netflix are to spend less money on fewer, better movies. “The goal was to have really great movies on Netflix and have consistency in quality, and he has delivered that,” Ms. Bajaria, the streamer’s chief content officer, said. What “better” and “quality” mean can be hard to define, but Mr. Lin sees an opportunity in certain types of projects that Hollywood’s legacy studios are leaving behind.
“There are movies that I grew up watching and I love that people aren’t making anymore,” he said. He wants Netflix to make more comedies, more romantic comedies, more book adaptations — more of the films that used to be the bread and butter of the medium.
Mr. Lin cited “People We Meet on Vacation” as an example. The rom-com, based on a best-selling novel by Emily Henry and starring the newcomers Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, generated more than 17 million views over its opening weekend and gave Netflix new homegrown stars. Ms. Bader is scheduled to appear in two upcoming movies on the platform.
For Wyck Godfrey, a “Vacation” producer, approving that casting was an impressive move. “Emily and Tom were not known names, and not the kind of names a theatrical studio would have cast, but they were the best for the roles,” he said. “After a couple of conversations with Netflix, they said, ‘Go for it.’ That was rare.”
Whether Mr. Lin’s movies are better than Mr. Stuber’s is a matter of opinion. The consensus among close observers is that they do seem to be more curated. This year, “The Rip” and “Remarkably Bright Creatures” have connected with both audiences and tastemakers. A recent headline in Vulture could have come straight from Mr. Lin’s publicist: “‘Apex’ Feels More Like a Real Movie Than Your Average Netflix Joint.”
There have also been plenty of critical duds, including “Ladies First,” which reviewers excoriated as “tiresomely un-fun,” “laughably earnest” and “shot in that odd Netflix house style that somehow looks simultaneously expensive and cheap.”
Netflix is bullish on its upcoming titles, particularly “Here Comes the Flood,” starring Denzel Washington and Robert Pattinson and directed by Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”), and “The Adventures of Cliff Booth,” starring Brad Pitt and directed by David Fincher from a script by Quentin Tarantino. Biggest of all, perhaps, could be Greta Gerwig’s film “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.” It is expected to premiere in 2027 with a full theatrical release, something Netflix has given to no other movie.
Mr. Lin emphasized that “Narnia” was an exception and insisted that the company’s perspective on movie theaters had not changed. “There is a group of filmmakers who still want theatrical. Those are filmmakers that we’ve accepted we just won’t work with,” he said, deploying what’s become his trademark bluntness.
The town is getting used to it. Several months ago, at a dinner with the team behind “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” its star, Sally Field, engaged Mr. Lin in a lengthy discussion about why he had chosen to release the film in May. Ms. Field wanted it to debut in the fall, for a better chance at Oscar consideration. Mr. Lin argued that it was a family drama, and the right date was just before Mother’s Day. The movie has remained in the streamer’s Top 10 for the past month.
And in January, Mr. Lin hosted a dinner in the private room of an upscale restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and others who made “The Rip.” Halfway through the meal, Mr. Lin announced that the group would play Mafia, a party game in which the best liar wins. This was unusual, maybe even awkward, for such a high-powered group, which also included Ms. Bajaria. But they went along with Mr. Lin’s game.
“I don’t know if you’ve played Mafia with actors,” Mr. Lin told me later, “but they are really good.”
Yes. Yes, they are. “Were you good?” I asked.
“I was terrible,” he said. “They literally said, ‘Dan, you are terrible at Mafia.’”
Nicole Sperling covers Hollywood and the streaming industry. She has been a reporter for more than two decades.
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