Why Portugal should Kill at Netflix
Why haven’t we spawned something with the likes and gravitas of La Casa de Papel?…
Awesome history full of plot twists. Hardcore couch potatoes with great storytelling skills. Creative and proactive as your next Zhan Yiming or Brad ‘Nazi’ Parscale. Someone with a paid access to the Internet tries to answer these and more questions.
PORTUGUESE COMPANIES NEVER FORESAW THE ARRIVAL OF “YOU DON’T SEE THE TV SHOW, THE TV SHOW SEES YOU” ERA
Working as a director or an actor in Portugal “sucks”. I’m paraphrasing but according to some Portuguese actors, as they fly coach to LA, they’ll complain about “the miserable working conditions” they experience back home.
In a nutshell, this is how cool and comfortable we are with the tv/movie/webseries industry in Portugal.
Of course the content creation has seen a recent boom. But podcasters and prestiged youtubers (they do what we do here — yes, I’m assuming I have their audience, rotfl — but in video, #respect!) cannot drive a weak and flawed industry forward.
So, forget the people, bring in the CEOs.
What about them?
ASLEEP
Well, they’re snoozed. You talk to NOS, MEO and the main ISPs running our Internet and TVs, they never — Ever — ventured into content production themselves.
They outsourced branded content, if needed. But laziness took over vision. With the whole market to themselves — NOS, the Portuguese market leader for movie distribution — they just stood there counting escudos and then… euros.
Because NOS and MEO and Optimus could have seen it and quickly jumped to in-house production.
We haven’t reached nobody at these companies because they would just laugh at our “lazy mentality”. Meh…
EASTER ISLAND DOES NOT LACK STORIES. WHY DON’T WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SHARE WITH THE WORLD?!
I’ve seen promo documentaries about Sunderland and Boca Juniors on Netflix.
And Andy Murray and Man City flicks on AmazonPrime.
I’m not saying we should talk about Benfica, Porto, Rosa Mota, Carlos Lopes or Cristiano Ronaldo.
But we are 10 million folks with 877 years of monarchy and 110 of established republican ‘democracy’, both carrying a solid background of good poets and not-so-bad writers (they’re better than Sorkin or Greg Daniels, it’s a question of rearranging the marketing Ps).
I’ve seen us represented in American shows in ways I never thought possible, both
Tragic
and Kinda Funny
I’ve seen Portuguese speaking actors in well-established shows
I’ve seen actors on well-known movies
and
WE DON’T HAVE A-LIST ACTORS. AND SO WHAT?…
António Silva. Joaquim de Almeida. Daniela Ruah. Vasco Santana. Marcantónio del Carlo. Paulo Pires. Diogo Morgado. Maria de Medeiros. Alba Céénas. Already snoozing…
If Netflix data teach us anything is that nobody needs A-listers to make or break.
Scorcese recently contributed to them with the GOAT actors and got shitfaced at the Oscars.
La Casa de Papel? I can’t name One actor. And I don’t me preocupo.
Yet it’s one of Netflix’s case studies and you can check it on a featurette that ‘seasons’ the rather uninspired and truly boring season 4.
BOLLYWOOD. NOLLYWOOD. PORTUGALYWOOD?…
It might be a thing. We have amazing writers. The likes of Nogueira, Pereira, Quadros, Markl, de Pina, youtubers and podcasters as creative as Teixeira da Mota or as unlikely as Carlos Coutinho de Vilhena, this is awesome talent wasted on our micro-country’s top brands ads, couple of Lisbon and Oporto Coliseums and The End.
Portugal absorbs its best creative brands and worse: it doesn’t even support them when they’re abroad.
I reached out to @omalestafeito João Quadros, who has a few hundred thousand followers in our twitter nanosphere, who, when asked to comment on something related to comedy/humor/funny made in Portugal, replied something like:
“I don’t believe that”.
Like… kinda lame. Conservative. And that’s cool. We have more Catholics than Brazil, per capita speaking.
The thing is… we’re a tiny conservative rectangle afraid to take action and risk outside our shores and seas. And they’re a whole continent proud of their culture and achievements.
IN THE END…
It’s all about great loglines. Good premises.
I admire simple people and folks like Schur, Ricky, the dude from BlackAF, the writers of Fariña and ‘Money Heist’ (that’s the shittiest translation ever but we can roll with it), I mean, even that Brazilian ‘So You Think you Know Buarque’ soap opera about four girls and a pub. Also that one about that kid rapper, the hustler and the catholic chic.
This is all reasonable content and way too easy for Netflix to buy and stream all around the world.
Netflix operates on movie libraries. As a streaming service, it must have content to be… streamed. This is the average library size, Movies, by country, 2020 data. I’ve put them in Portuguese but come on… #getoverit
Austrália — 3,480
Canada — 3,844
Alemanha — 2,704
Índia — 3,515
Japão — 3,046
México — 2,839
Nova Zelândia — 3,436
Reino Unido — 3,710
Now, for shows:
If you wanna get more into this, please go here. I’m talking about a tiny, tiny sample in terms of Netflix audience. Yet I once heard the character Lisboa, from La Casa de Papel, was written to cater the Portuguese audience… #bollocks
There’s a lot of interesting data to be analyzed, regarding content availability, access. It’s kind of fascinating to check that certain movies have targeted audiences. Who judges and determines this?
Well… see below
also
You can also find out which countries have the most ‘Oscars’, per se.
I can go further and get you drunk on this and also that type of data. I can tell you that vodafone is the fastest Internet provider, specifically for Netflix subscribers. MEO? The worst.
PORTUGAL THE COUNTRY
Earlier this year, Portugal’s Institute for Movies and Fine Arts (ICA, it stands for Cinema and Audiovisual, but we can roll with it:) sponsored some sort of ‘contest’, in order to scout scriptwriters capable of launching Portuguese made or Portuguese inspired content for Netflix.
I dunno how this will turn out. Hope it’s for the best, really. Because what happened to Netflix, during COVID days, wasn’t all roses and rainbows.
TV ratings went through the roof during #stayathome.
Netflix was just one of many options, when it used to be the go-to choice, the most reliable, diverse and customizable, content-wise. People traded scheduled TV for scheduling and favouriting shows from India, Nigeria, Spain and every other country known to mankind.
Time slots didn’t matter anymore. Portuguese people, just as every other world citizen, watched standard TV at 2am. It’s rather ludicrous but it happened: morning time slots had more than 200 thousand folks glued to the screen. From 6pm to 8PM, more than 500 thousand.
Below you can check which shows broke the 10% share barrier, by order of viewership.
Keep in mind:
1) Conservative country;
2) COVID time, so everybody ate and drank News;
3) A country not as comfortable with comedy as England, let’s say;
4) A country with an older audience.
So…
8 — Morning News, 10,1%
7 — The Price is Right (PT), 10,2% (peaked at 21,4%!)
6 — More News, this time at 8AM, 10,5% (peaked at 18,5%)
5 — Even More News, at Friday, 10,7%
Don’t care, let’s check the top 3:
Terra Brava — peaked at 27%
Evening News from SIC — 26,7%
Nazaré — peaked at 27%
OK. So people watched the news, got all stressed out and then comfortably saw some Drama. Not Netflix shows.
Standard, Portuguese-written (or imported from abroad, idk) Portuguese spoken Drama. That’s not the worst indicator in History… I think.
REASONS WHY
Portugal is too small of a country. Things don’t easily scale, worse, they just don’t get to scale.
We are Europe’s #1 manufacturer of bicycles and… where do they go? Abroad.
This is no China (you open a bike shop, you’re the world leader in bike sales) nor United States (you attack the international market furiously and vigorously, banning any chance of competition, also carrying coin and language advantage).
So, literally 0 dudes cares that we make bikes. And equally 0 dudes will click like or tap follow. Nor nobody knows about it. Next chapter…
ACTION!
Same thing with movies. We don’t have a bold film making tradition.
Our movies are touted to be slow (European style), uninspired, dark, cheesy, with bad dialogues and worse acting. This was more of a 90s thing. Then… something funny happened. Besides facebook, millennials, youtubers and s#it.
Like… Music was suddenly amazing. Everybody flocked to Portuguese music. Buraka. Sam. Mariza. Deolinda. Amor Electro. Diabo. Zambujo. Like… every Portuguese musician was cool. And sounded awesome.
Movies never got this rebranding. I don’t know why. But they stayed as they where decades earlier: invisible to the Portuguese audience.
TO THIS DATE
One of the top performers in Portuguese IMDB is… this title right here
Directed by You Don’t Know, and starring Who Cares, Zona J made an impact back then. It showed Portuguese people could take their lazy asses out of the sofá.
Basically, you don’t need a contest. You need a pitch. A good logline. And this person.
And also this
Even this one might be useful
And you’ll have to keep in mind that…
STORY
might be useful. Yesterday I thought about writing a movie about a certain superhero. And I’ve thought about a second season for this show called Chozen. But… who cares when you write it alone and share it with nobody?
Platforms are available. You’ve got Disney+. You’ve got HULU. YouTube. Vimeo. You have a supercomputer on your pocket, you have HD cameras.
Go outside. Shoot. Rewrite. Shoot more.
Tap Share. And see what happens.
Complain = no gain!
BUDGET
Doesn’t really matter when you talk FANG stocks… plus Disney. Worry not about this!
ICA
Did a noble thing, considering our market size.
Here are the winners.
Check out your latest Netflix catalogue in a few months. You might see these titles… let us pray!!!
FINISTERRA, Guilherme Branquinho e Leone Niel (Fiction);
MY NAME IS JORGE: A REDEMPTION STORY, de Sofia Pinto Coelho (Documentary);
O CHEFE JACOB, de Raquel Palermo e João Lacerda Matos (Fiction);
RABO DE PEIXE, de Augusto Fraga, Marcos Castiel e André Szankowski (Fiction);
VICTORIA, de Dinis M. Costa (Fiction)
Also awared were:
BARRANCO DE CEGOS, Luís Filipe Rocha (Fiction — btw, this guy is a director, what the hell is he doing here…);
CLEPTOCRACIA, João Brandão (Fiction);
PARADOXA, Luísa Costa Gomes (Fiction);
PAREDES BRANCAS, POVO MUDO, de Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, André Costa, Catarina Crua e Ricardo Oliveira (Documentary)
THIS IS NOT A KANGA, de João Nuno Pinto, Fernanda Polacow e Bruno Morais Cabral (Documentary)
So maybe… just maybe… we can dream of having our own La Casa de Papel.
#goportugal
#ftw
