2015/12/18

Movies on Netflix Australia

I recently signed up for Netflix Australia. It's great for watching recent US TV shows, especially Netflix-produced ones such as Daredevil.

Netflix Australia, however, has a terrible range of movies. According to finder.com.au, the entire sum of films in Netflix AU can be summarised by the following histograms of movies per year:


In case you're not seeing that too clearly, here's a zoom of movies pre-2000:


Or perhaps we should just look by decade:

1920 2
1950 1
1960 5
1970 18
1980 26
1990 106
2000 572
2010 689

That's right. You can watch any movies from the 1950s as long as it's "Seven Samurai" (hey, at least they picked a good one). Any movie from the '60s: "Sanjuro", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Come Drink With Me", "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", and "The Graduate". And at least 1/3 of the movies from the 70s are Kung Fu ("The 36th Chamber of Shaolin", etc.). What a bizarre selection.

This is pretty damning. While I have no reason to doubt finder.com.au, I also don't know how accurate these figures are, but they ring true to my success (or lack thereof) in browsing for movies I want to watch. And that larger number of movies after 2000? They're mostly crap you don't want to watch:



If you're interested in movies, don't get Netflix Australia as of December 2015. But if you just get Netflix for the TV, it comes with a few good movies as well.