Marvel’s ‘Iron Fist’ critics rating: 0% on Rotten Tomatoes – Business Insider (Mar 9, 2017)

Netflix’s original content has always been a mixed bag – on the one hand, shows like House of Cards won awards (and also won Netflix lots of customers), but on the other there was Marco Polo, which critics panned (it has a 24% score on Rotten Tomatoes) but audiences enjoyed anyway (the corresponding audience score is 93%). Given that Netflix doesn’t release any kind of viewing data, it’s emphasized positive critical response as a validation of its original content, but it’s also defended shows like Marco Polo as being popular with real people even if critics didn’t like them. This new show has done even worse than Marco Polo with critics, but there’s a decent chance audiences will lap that up too. The fact is that any content production is a gamble, and given that Netflix doesn’t use Amazon’s pilot model to select new shows, that gamble is that much larger, especially with a big budget, Marvel-branded show. Only Netflix knows what its internal calculus on what makes a show a success or a failure looks like, but I’m guessing a one-off critical panning won’t do too much damage to its original content strategy. If it starts to become a pattern, however, that would be more worrisome.

via Business Insider


The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.

Vote for or share this post

Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.