Netflix will have to pay to punish Georgia

Will Hollywood finally deliver on its threat to boycott Georgia over politics? Netflix has become the first major studio to threaten to leave the state over the new abortion restrictions. Yet Netflix is in Georgia in the first place only because of the state’s ruthless capitalism: Tax breaks for big business and right-to-work policies. My favorite smash-’em-up of Hollywood grandstanding and economics is The Campaign. Remember that? It was Will Ferrell’s 2012 Koch Brothers movie. In the film, the nefarious capitalists the Motch Brothers are harnessing the full power of NAFTA to outsource American jobs. The sole funny element of the movie is that it decried the Motch Brothers while being made in union-unfriendly, tax-refunding Louisiana. Ferrell and his lefty buddies (Zach Galifianakis, Adam McKay, etc.) outsourced the movie from California and its crushing cost structure. I suppose they could have demanded the movie be made in L.A. instead of LA, but then it might not have gotten made. (As it is, it appears to have lost money.) I mean, whoa, you know we’re liberal, but let’s not do anything crazy like cost ourselves a paycheck.

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This is why I’m skeptical that Netflix is going to boycott Georgia. Netflix is an unusual kind of Hollywood studio in that it is spending money at a rate that would make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blanch, but Netflix is also having one of those “Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear” moments from a Jurassic Park movie. On the left: an AT&T-Rex (the new AT&T streaming service starring its WarnerMedia properties, set to launch in coming months). On the right, a rampaging Mousiraptor (Disney’s new streaming service, debuting in November and fueled by all of the Marvel and Pixar movies it will soon chomp off of Netflix). Overhead: the Huludactyl (Hulu, which Disney now owns, along with the Fox film studio, is preparing to dominate Netflix in programming for grownups). The last thing Netflix needs is to be creating problems for itself by pulling out of Georgia and forsaking all those yummy tax subsidies.

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