noun
ga·vage gə-ˈväzh gä-
: introduction of material into the stomach by a tube
Foie gras is made from duck or goose livers fattened through a force-feeding process called gavage—administering gradually larger amounts of feed through a small tube in the bird’s throat.
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What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance. Which in turn means that any given show just doesn’t matter quite as much as it could in the era of broadcast TV. In this context, even an undeniable hit can wind up feeling like a sort of failure. Take “Triple Frontier,” the 2019 action thriller starring Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac: It was one of the platform’s most popular movies that year, but as Lotz points out in her book, that doesn’t mean it’s any more valuable to the company. A $115 million movie budget is hard for Netflix to justify at almost any level of viewership, given that at the end of the day it supplies just two hours of content for a subscriber base that’s paying for a sense of infinity. And indeed, Lotz’s skepticism was confirmed: Ted Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer, reportedly singled out the title in an internal meeting, calling for a better calibration between budget and audience. This was in the middle of 2019, when the financial press was starting to ask questions about the sustainability of Netflix’s debt-financed growth.
Matt Stoller, the anti-monopolist writer, cited this same story in a blog post about Hollywood’s travails. His theory was that Hollywood has gotten so big that it can’t even discover what people really want anymore. As a contrast, he cites the success of “Back to the Future,” an odd movie that became an enormous hit, eventually earning hundreds of millions. But as Stoller points out, in 1985, this happened slowly: It opened small in July, in about 1,400 theaters, and crept up to 1,550 theaters by the end of August, staying in at least 1,000 theaters until the Christmas season. (A big-budget Hollywood movie released today typically opens in about 4,000 theaters and is gone in a few weeks.) The movie, Stoller writes, “was put into a market, where information circulated among buyers and sellers.” There was a constant interplay between the art and the audience (and the middlemen) that determined its reach and legitimacy. Now, in Stoller’s eyes, the public is instead subject to something like content gavage, delivered 4,000 theaters at a time.
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