Netflix just announced Grown Ups 3, and I need you to understand what this means: the streaming wars are over, and populism won.
Adam Sandler and his usual crew - Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and presumably Rob Schneider if he's available - are returning for a third installment of the franchise that film critics despise and audiences inexplicably love.
The first Grown Ups made $271 million worldwide in 2010 despite a 10% Rotten Tomatoes score. The sequel made $247 million in 2013 despite a 7% score. Nobody liked these movies. Except, you know, hundreds of millions of people.
This is Netflix's content strategy in microcosm: give people what they actually watch, not what they should watch. While other studios chase prestige and awards, Netflix is perfectly happy to spend $80 million on a movie that will get savaged by critics and watched by 100 million households.
Sandler's Netflix deal, reportedly worth $275 million over multiple films, has been one of the streamer's smartest investments. His movies - Murder Mystery, Hubie Halloween, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah - consistently rank among Netflix's most-watched content. They're not changing cinema. They're just keeping subscribers subscribed.
Is Grown Ups 3 going to win any Oscars? No. Will it play at Cannes? Absolutely not. Will 80 million people watch it in the first month and then immediately forget it exists? Yes.
And that's fine. Not every movie needs to be The Power of the Dog. Sometimes people just want to watch Adam Sandler and his friends goof around for 90 minutes. Netflix understands this. Traditional studios still don't.
The announcement came during Netflix's upfront presentation, which tells you everything about how they position this content. It's not prestige. It's not awards bait. It's reliable, middle-of-the-road entertainment that performs exactly as expected.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything - except Netflix, occasionally, when it comes to what people actually want to watch on a Tuesday night after work.
