Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO, clarified the streaming giant’s attitudes towards theatrical exhibition during Tuesday’s 2026 Q3 earnings call. He emphasized that family films will likely get the widest releases, while other movies will remain having more limited rollouts.
Sarandos began by stressing that Netflix is still “a streaming-first business.” “This is our core. But we consider, every time we have a new film – the film itself, the audience for the film and the filmmaker when we’re trying to come up with the release plan,” Sarandos said.
2026 will see the release of “about 30 films” theatrically, which is “pretty much” what Netflix did last year. “And each one of these have their own bespoke release pattern,” Sarandos said.
Most of the theatrical releases are limited releases, mostly to qualify for awards, where the films will play in a handful of theaters (some owned by Netflix) for a couple of weeks before the same movie winds up on Netflix. But not always.
“We start off by looking at the projects we have, asking ourselves, How do we best serve movie lovers?” Sarandos said. He acknowledged that “many of our members” want to see those movies in a theater, which leads Netflix leadership to ask, “How do we do it without actually harming the view value to Netflix?”
Sarandos pointed to the 47-day window that the streamer is giving “La Bola Negra,” the historical epic from Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo ahead of its debut on Netflix and a smaller theatrical release for the upcoming Peter Berg-directed dram “The Mosquito Bowl.” Additionally, Sarandos talked about “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,” the new David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt, who returns to his Oscar-winning role. (Quentin Tarantino wrote the script and produces.) “Cliff Booth” will have a two-week Imax exhibition.
Where that approach shifts, Sarandos said, was for “big family films” – Greta Gerwig’s C.S. Lewis adaptation “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” and the animated “Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory” will get wide theatrical releases because, as Sarandos said, “both films have big global IP and big global fandom. We’re very excited about how they’ll play out next year.” He did not elaborate on why, say, “Steps,” the first end-to-end Netflix Animation Studios production and Brad Bird’s animated sci-fi noir “Ray Gunn,” both aimed at a family audience, won’t be getting wide theatrical releases.
“Our theatrical strategy has evolved. It’s evolved to include a traditional 45-day window for a handful of films, but the other one that’s been important to folks is that we are also now reporting box office grosses for those releases when we do it, so that’s new,” Sarandos said. “La Bola Negra,” he said, had a per-screen average of $69,000, “which is the second highest per-screen average ever for a non-English language film in the United States.” It was second only to “Parasite,” which Sarandos noted, “went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture.”
“We’re really excited about where we sit. Now, of course, we have one week of public reporting a box office under our belt, and we’re real happy about it. Let’s check it again in about six months,” Sarandos said.
