Are Indie Docs Hot Again? At Least for Netflix

The streamer sure bought a lot of nonfiction at Sundance.

For Documentary Magazine, I wrote an article about this year’s nonfiction market at the Sundance Film Festival—please read the whole story, “With Sundance Boost, Even Original Documentaries Could Make a Comeback in 2024.” But every time I filed the story, Netflix would announce another doc acquisition and I’d have to edit it. First, it happened with Daughters; then it happened with Will and Harper. By next week, maybe we’ll have to write a correction if Netflix buys another documentary.

The mammoth streaming company acquired an unprecedented four documentaries (the aforementioned two, plus the Norwegian awards contender Ibelin and the loathsome crowdpleaser Skywalkers: A Love Story)—and that was already coming into the festival with Yance Ford’s POWER, a searing and sophisticated socio-historical portrait of police and policing in America. If some of us thought documentaries were DOA in the marketplace (good article Addie!), Netflix seemed to suggest that was not the case—at least for streaming audiences. But honestly, I can’t figure it out. When Netflix released its huge data dump of streaming hours for the top 18,000+ pieces of content late last year, feature docs were barely on the list.

As I indicated in the Documentary Magazine piece, a work such as Daughters, focusing on the struggles of incarcerated Black men as they get a rare moment to connect with their daughters, is not the type of documentary that anyone was buying for the last year, or at least, based on the description. Yes, it’s very well crafted, and yes, it’s very emotional, but there are at least a half dozen social issue docs that are almost as good from the last year that never got picked up.

I know that Kerry Washington signed on to Daughters to raise its profile, and Jerry Seinfeld’s wife is also an EP, but I’m not sure that really makes a difference. (Several years ago, I wrote a story for IndieWire.com, called “Do Celebrity Supporters like Brad Pitt and Eva Longoria Actually Help Documentaries?” and the jury seemed mixed. “We have not seen that they [celebrity influencers] make any difference in commercial viability or the audience excitement about a film,” producer Dan Cogan told me at the time.)

Perhaps the real issue is that Netflix doesn’t need to get people to leave the house and go to a theater to see Daughters, which is where the “crisis in distribution” really remains an issue. If “Indie Docs Are Hot Again,” as I provocatively titled this post, it may simply be as content filler and awards bait for the streaming giants.

As great as it is that Netflix has five documentaries coming out soon that are all worth seeing (with the exception of Skywalkers, even though people will love it), my biggest question for 2024 is whether and how much these nonfiction films will be watched in theaters. I’m excited to see what Neon manages to pull off with Seeking Mavis Beacon; I’m excited to see if Warner Bros commits a wide theatrical release to Super/Man, the Christopher Reeves doc; and I’m excited to see which theatrical distributors take risks on Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (a film that I’m calling “the cinematic love child of Adam Curtis and Raoul Peck”) and Gary Hustwit’s generative A.I. documentary Eno, which plays differently every time it screens. Both of those films seem like they have the opportunity to present unique theatrical experiences that feel “original and different from what you can watch at home,” as Neon executive Dan O’Meara told me about Seeking Mavis Beacon.

But it’ll be interesting to see who steps up. While a bunch of docs did get acquired at Sundance 2024, none have yet been bought by theatrical distributors. But I guess there’s always next week.