Netflix’s almost unimaginably high budget for movies and TV shows will actually be significantly larger than previously expected, reaching around $13 billion, according to The Economist.
The projection greatly exceeds the $8 billion figure that has been widely reported. This compares to just $2.5 billion for HBO, the content company Netflix has publicly identified as its chief competition.
The Economist said Netflix will produce 82 feature films in 2018, compared to 23 for Warner Bros. and 10 for The Walt Disney Company.
Goldman Sachs predicts that Netflix could be spending as much as $22 billion on content by 2022.
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While remaining “supportive of the Netflix story,” Barclays analyst Danielle Popper told investors in a note this morning that Netflix might be producing too much content.
“The deluge of originals on the service can worsen user experience by making content discovery more difficult,” Popper said.
Netflix is undeniably the most relevant company in the modern video ecosystem. Media companies struggling to keep up with its global expansion and fast-growing market capitalization, which has come within one binge-watching session of $180 billion.
Pay TV operators, meanwhile, have long since abandoned notions that Netflix can be vanquished head-on. Most major U.S. services have integrated Netflix natively into their video user interfaces.