Netflix Called Cinemas Outmoded. Now It Is Copying Nolan’s IMAX Playbook
Netflix is cutting 1,000 jobs as Greta Gerwig's Narnia heads for IMAX screens, following the trail Christopher Nolan's record-breaking The Odyssey blazed this summer.
On Tuesday Netflix unveiled the first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. This week the Wall Street Journal also reported that the company is cutting about 1,000 jobs, roughly 6 per cent of its staff and its biggest round of sackings since 2022. The two announcements tell one story. The streamer whose co-chief executive, Ted Sarandos, called going to the cinema “an outmoded idea, for most people” is betting its biggest film on the biggest screens in the world.
Gerwig’s film opens exclusively on IMAX screens on 10 February 2027, goes wide two days later and reaches subscribers only on 2 April. That is a 49-day run in cinemas, longer than the 45-day window Sarandos once mocked as “completely out of step with the consumer experience”. Netflix now says it wants to give the film “an expanded, wide release with a full theatrical window“. Adam Aron, the chief executive of AMC, the cinema chain Netflix spent a decade bypassing, replied: “We are in their corner fully.”
The Nolan effect
The man who wrote this playbook works across town at Universal. Christopher Nolan shot The Odyssey entirely on IMAX film cameras, and the studio put tickets for its IMAX 70mm screenings on sale a full year before release. Some sold out within hours. By August his Homeric epic had passed $1.1 billion, the biggest gross of his career, and IMAX screens alone had taken $289 million, more than a quarter of the total and an all-time record for the format. Audiences were queuing for the size of the screen as much as for the story.
Nolan has preached this gospel for more than a decade. In 2014 he told UKScreen that pure cinema means making “a film that has to be experienced as a film“. Three years later, while Netflix was hoovering up auteurs for its platform, he told cinema owners at CinemaCon: “The only platform I’m interested in talking about is theatrical exhibition.” This summer he won the argument at the box office.
Rehearsals in the dark
Netflix has been creeping towards the multiplex for a while. In August 2025 a sing-along version of its animated hit KPop Demon Hunters took about $18 million in a weekend and handed Netflix its first number one at the American box office. Its first Narnia plan was timid: two weeks on IMAX screens over Thanksgiving, then straight to streaming at Christmas. American chains threatened to refuse the film, Disney was reported to be strongly opposed, and one insider complained that IMAX had struck the deal without consulting its studio partners. A production delay pushed the film into 2027, and Netflix came back with the full theatrical release the exhibitors had demanded.
The cast is built for the big screen too: Emma Mackey, Carey Mulligan, Ciarán Hinds, Daniel Craig and Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan, with music by Mark Ronson and Andrew Watt, who gave Gerwig’s Barbie its pulse. Gerwig took that film past $1 billion for Warner Bros. Netflix wants the same magic on its own balance sheet.
A platform without a studio
The deeper reason is the studio Netflix failed to buy. Last December it agreed to pay $82.7 billion for the Warner Bros. studios and HBO Max. Paramount outbid it, Netflix walked away in February with a $2.8 billion break fee, and on 6 October Warner passed to David Ellison’s Skydance, leaving Netflix to face YouTube and a bigger rival with one product to sell.
Every major studio now owns a streaming service of its own, and each feeds it with films that have already made their money and their reputations in cinemas. A blockbuster that fills IMAX screens arrives on Disney+ or HBO Max as an event. A film that goes straight to Netflix arrives as one more tile in the menu. Netflix has learned that a platform alone cannot manufacture that kind of fame, and the cinema is the one window it cannot build for itself.
The fight for the biggest screens is getting crowded. Bloomberg reports that Disney has talked to Paramount, Universal, Sony and Lionsgate about sharing Infinity Vision, its new label for premium large-format auditoriums, which covers about 5,500 screens, roughly three times as many as IMAX. The studios are waiting to see how it sells Avengers: Doomsday on 18 December.
Netflix reports its quarterly results on 20 October, and investors will hear about cost cuts. The more telling number arrives in February, when a streaming company asks people to leave their sofas and pay for a ticket. In C. S. Lewis’s story, children reach Narnia through a wardrobe. Netflix has found its own: subscribers will reach its films through the cinema.
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