The upheaval of Peter Rice’s appointment and Bela Bajaria’s ouster as chief content officer sets off speculation about the streaming giant’s next moves Peter Rice and Ynon Kreiz met for a meal in late September, days before Kreiz surprised the industry by jumping from the CEO job at Mattel to become co-chief executive of Skydance with David Ellison. The report of the Kreiz-Rice meeting came in the New York Post’s Page Six after Kreiz’s role at Skydance was announced. That set off speculation that he was recruiting Rice for a big role at the enlarged studio.
It turns out Kreiz had been trying to persuade Rice to take a board seat at Barbie’s house. Rice, however, was not destined to advise on matters of Uno and Matchbox cars. The former Fox Searchlight and Fox Networks Group chief — who went to Disney in 2019 as its top TV executive only to be unceremoniously axed during the Chapek regime — has vaulted back to one of the town’s most powerful posts: chief content officer of Netflix.
Media coverage of Kreiz’s courtship of Rice is one of the spurs that pushed Netflix to make the move on a hire that will have ripple effects across its expansive film and TV operations. The ouster of Bela Bajaria from the role that Rice now occupies was messy, and angered many inside and outside of Netflix. We live in Silicon Valley,” said a prominent agent, citing the general mood of the creative community.
The brusque treatment of an executive of Bajaria’s stature is a sign that no one is safe from scrutiny, and no one should ever count on making a graceful exit. It’s shameful, it sucks and it adds to the feeling that we’re all working by Silicon Valley rules,” the agent said. The source noted the irony of Bajaria getting the ax just two weeks after the executive that she replaced at Netflix — Cindy Holland — was also hastily ousted from her new role at Skydance.
Holland’s role was sacrificed to make room for Casey Bloys, the HBO chief who is taking over all streaming now that the Warner Bros. Discovery merger is completed. The bombshell executive upheaval at Netflix, coupled with signals that insiders are reading from the layoffs that Netflix implemented this week, has set off renewed speculation about the streaming giant getting back in the hunt for a major studio or some other significant content assets.
NBCUniversal is a logical target, given that the company will be spun out from Comcast next year and thus would make for a much smaller and more manageable acquisition than the entirety of Comcast. The switch to Rice also raises questions about whether Netflix will remain as aggressive in its local-language content strategy as it had been under Bajaria. Rice’s reference in his first memo to Netflix staffers to the need to deliver more buzzy hits for the “UCAN” market (Netflix’s wonky term for the United States and Canada) did not go unnoticed.
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