Ben Affleck says Netflix movies are made through an "assembly line process"

After recently announcing that his latest collaboration with Matt Damon would be a production company that promises to put creatives first, Ben Affleck has shared more of his thoughts about the state of cinema. Taking the stage at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit (via Variety) to promote Artists Equity, the Gone Girl star took aim at Netflix.

“I see no differentiation between commercial and quality,” Affleck says. “You ask [CEO] Reed Hastings, ‘Hey well, we went for quantity.’ I’m sure that established a footprint, I’m sure there’s some wisdom in that, and I’m sure they had a great strategy, but I would have said, ‘How do you make 50 good movies a year?’ How is that possible? There is no committee big enough. You just can’t do it. It’s a thing that requires attention and dedication and work and it resists the sort of assembly line process.”

Affleck still noted his respect for Netflix’s head of original films Scott Stuber, and he previously starred in the streamer’s 2019 action thriller Triple Frontier. He also offered up some musings on modern movie stardom, though as a Batman, he didn’t bring Marvel into it.

“On Netflix, the biggest movies are Christmas, or these kind of early aughts stars,” the Argo director says. “They had a level of awareness then that is much bigger than your sort of person on a TV show does now because there’s just so much to see. There’s a lot of investment that’s gone into a lot of people my age, around that age. My wife, who’s 53, the most famous, admired, spectacular woman in the world, there weren’t 53-year-old stars in the 1940s and ’50s. That was it. And there weren’t really for men [either]. Paul Newman was kind of old at 37. You read about Newman at 37, 38 and they were like, ‘Well, as you move into the sunset of your life, Paul, after Towering Inferno….’ And now people are much more familiar with this group of people. They’ve kept that name recognition in a marketplace that is so diffuse where it’s more and more and more valuable to be able to attract eyeballs, to be able to get attention, to be able to get the consumer to watch you.”

Affleck and Damon will be putting Artists Equity to the test with their first release, a feature about the inception of the Air Jordan due out next year. The Boston-bred duo will also be co-starring in the project alongside Viola Davis, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, and Marlon Wayans.