According to Deadline, Netflix on Thursday booted Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria, a 10-year veteran, replacing her with ex-Disney TV chairman Peter Rice, the day after the company laid off roughly 1,000 people in its biggest cut in history.
Six years in and the six-year itch wins. Sarandos does not fire, he rotates. One year you are the chief content officer, the next you are the ex-chief content officer, and the press release calls it a departure as if the 1,000 people who got cardboard boxes on Wednesday had simply taken a long lunch.
The rumor mill had her going for months and Netflix denied every report, which in Hollywood PR means the exit interview was on the calendar all along. Word is she was not told until very recently, possibly Monday, while standing on a stage in Cannes accepting a Variety award. Congratulations on the honor. New hobby: unemployment.
Rice ran Fox Searchlight through the Slumdog and Little Miss Sunshine years and was Disney's TV chairman until 2022. Zero streaming experience. A rep says his secret sauce is knowing how to read a script and make it better, which is either the most useful sentence in this whole mess or the most confident one. The hallways reportedly cheered when his name dropped. The same building where 1,000 jobs got packed out that week. The math is not in your favor, hallway.
And the trend the release forgot to footnote: in the last year, three major streamers swapped out their content chiefs. All three were women. All three were replaced by men. The pattern is the pattern, and the pattern has a pattern.
YOUR TURN: Is the internal gloom and doom memo just standard Netflix culture, or is the reorg going deeper than the release admits?
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