Under Dan Lin, insisting on a cinema window is not a negotiating position — it is the reason not to get the call.

Scott Stuber built Netflix Film around prestige. Roma, The Irishman, The Power of the Dog each required a theatrical run to attract the directors who made them. Dan Lin took the chair in April 2024 and removed the requirement entirely. The directors who insist on theatrical release, he has said, are not a group to negotiate with. They are a group Netflix has decided to live without.

Lin was direct when the question was put to him. “There is a group of filmmakers who still want theatrical,” he said. “Those are filmmakers that we’ve accepted we just won’t work with.” The trade he prefers: a wider, cheaper catalogue. More mid-budget films, broader genre range, “someone’s favorite movie” rather than every cinephile’s once-in-a-cycle event. Volume and repeatability, not individual prestige.

The biography matters. Lin built Rideback on The Lego Movie and Stephen King’s It — commercially durable films, neither of which needed a festival circuit to find an audience. He has spent his career building systems, not courting reputations. The Netflix job is, for him, a continuation of that logic.

One name tests the rule. Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will get a genuine wide theatrical run — IMAX previews beginning February 10, 2027, a global opening two days later, the Netflix drop on April 2. Lin names the exception readily. That is the point: it is the one that makes the boundary visible.

The template titles he holds up are elsewhere. The romantic comedy People We Meet on Vacation drew more than 17 million views in its opening weekend. The animated KPop Demon Hunters cleared $19 million. Even David Fincher’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man got only brief IMAX-style rollouts — short enough to read as policy, not distribution strategy.

Martin Scorsese and Alfonso Cuarón made Netflix a credible film studio in the 2010s. Lin’s position is that the credibility no longer depends on them. The guest list has changed. The door policy has been written down and published.

Tags: Netflix, Martin Scorsese, Stephen King, David Fincher, ip-strategy, Dan Lin