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The winds of fortune in Hollywood can change swiftly. Bela Bajaria is out as chief content officer at Netflix after a decade where she stewarded hits such as “Bridgerton,” “Squid Game,” “Adolescence,” “Arcane” and “Stranger Things,” just to name a few.
But as the streaming king’s user engagement has sagged over the course of 2026 amid pricey live events deals and Skydance, fresh off of swiping Warner Bros. from Netflix with a $110 billion acquisition bid, prepares to challenge its supremacy, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos announced a major change on Thursday, bringing in former top Fox and Disney executive Peter Rice to oversee the company’s $20 billion content budget.
After spending the last couple of years under Bajaria focusing on bringing WWE, NFL, MLB and the FIFA Women’s World Cup off of linear and into its content machine, Netflix’s choice of Rice signals a back-to-basics approach. Rice’s roots are planted firmly in the specialty film world; he has also overseen television content from broadcast to cable to streaming — and he is expected to refocus on film and TV as the core of Netflix’s business.
“Peter is one of the most effective at-scale operators in the entertainment industry. His business acumen is sharp, his talent relationships are exceptionally strong and his experience across TV and film is deep and broad,” Sarandos said in a statement. “He understands what makes stories resonate, and he’s spent his career helping talent do the best work of their lives. I’m excited to welcome him to Netflix as chief content officer as we continue to scale and deliver members more of the stories they love.”
A strong track record
Rice’s executive career has been on pause since 2022, when he was ousted as Disney’s chairman of television and general entertainment by then-CEO Bob Chapek. It was an abrupt move that took senior executives by surprise and caused Disney’s stock price to drop nearly 4%. According to one report, firing Rice took Chapek all of seven minutes. He told Rice he was a bad fit for “the new Disney culture” that Chapek was cultivating.
It was unclear if Chapek even knew that Rice routinely held Zoom town halls and Q&As during the pandemic, which endeared him to the rank-and-file Disney employees. Regardless, it became in hindsight one of several errors by Chapek that led to his own ousting and Bob Iger’s return.
But perhaps the segment of Rice’s career that may be most relevant to his future at Netflix was his time in the 2000s as president of Fox Searchlight, where he oversaw the release of Oscar-winning films like “Juno,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Sideways.”
His most successful partnership formed during his time at Searchlight was with Danny Boyle, who released the acclaimed 2002 horror film “28 Days Later” with the specialty distributor. Six years later, Boyle, Rice and Searchlight brought the film world “Slumdog Millionaire,” the drama that starred a then-unknown Dev Patel as a young man whose turbulent childhood in the slums of Mumbai serve him well when he appears on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”.
Earning eight Oscars and $378 million at the global box office, “Slumdog Millionaire” still stands as one of the top five highest-grossing Best Picture winners of the past quarter-century and cemented a relationship with Boyle that has continued to this day, as Rice produced the filmmaker’s 2025 legacy sequel “28 Years Later” and its Nia DaCosta-directed follow-up “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.”
Rice’s other producing credits since his Disney exit reflect his relationships with established filmmakers, including Alex Garland’s dystopian film “Warfare,” Jason Reitman’s “SNL” origin story “Saturday Night,” Aaron Sorkin’s recent Facebook legal thriller “The Social Reckoning” and Garland’s upcoming adaptation of the acclaimed video game “Elden Ring.”
Rebuilding bridges
Netflix will be leaning on Rice to use his relationship-building skills as the company has seen several high-profile departures over the past few months. David Fincher, whose new film “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” will be released by Netflix in Imax theaters this Thanksgiving, opted not to re-up his production deal with Netflix. Matt and Ross Duffer, who had arguably Netflix’s biggest in-house pop culture success with “Stranger Things,” have left for Paramount while “Marriage Story” and “Jay Kelly” director Noah Baumbach has also joined the Skydance fold via Warner Bros.’ Clockwork label.
Rice will also have to stabilize what has been a confusing film strategy for Netflix, which had pivoted away from the big budget prestige plays of the past like Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.” While the company stumbled upon greatness last year when Sony sent it the original animated smash hit “KPop Demon Hunters,” Netflix insiders told TheWrap that the record-breaking success of that film masked tensions between the company’s film chief, Dan Lin, and its awards team led by Lisa Taback.
While Lin has been more frugal, with the occasional exception like Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” Rice’s tastes align more with the highbrow preferences of Taback, who will be trying to push the streamer’s acclaimed Cannes acquisition, “La Bola Negra,” to the Best Picture Oscar that has to date eluded the streamer. There have also been reports that Lin’s approach led to tensions with Fincher and Greta Gerwig, who has been handed one of Netflix’s largest film budgets ever for her adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.”
Rice’s arrival may soon mean Lin’s exit. Two insiders with knowledge of the Netflix film division told TheWrap that the company has had difficulty hiring film executives because they did not want to report to Bajaria, asking instead to report to Sarandos. Her departure opens the door to a larger pool of executives more willing to work with Rice.
Lin’s right-hand man Doug Belgrad exited the streamer Wednesday as part of the 1,000-person layoffs. A reshuffling of the film division just two years after Lin’s arrival may be in the cards.
If and when that happens, the team that Rice assembles will come in at a time when Netflix is set to wade into a part of Hollywood it once abhorred: the movie theater. “La Bola Negra” will be getting a release in select theaters this weekend with a 45-day theatrical window, a major pivot from the two or three-week windows given to the precious few films Netflix has previously deigned to release on the big screen, like Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” film “Glass Onion.”
For years, Sarandos has insisted that theaters are not a major part of Netflix’s film plans. But that stance began to thaw last year when the company began its pursuit of Warner Bros. Though that acquisition attempt failed, Netflix is starting to put some of its most high-profile films in theaters for longer periods of time, including “Cliff Booth” and “Narnia.”
How far this theatrical experiment will go is still unclear. Netflix has signaled that it is not going to release a full theatrical slate of 15+ films like Amazon MGM started doing this year. But theatrical releases have become essential to securing top filmmakers like Gerwig, who made a 45-day window a non-negotiable term when in talks with Netflix over “Narnia.”
Just a day before Bajaria’s exit, Netflix raised eyebrows by dropping the first trailer for Gerwig’s film, which featured Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” a song that the British rock band had famously never allowed to be used in films or television but relented after a talk with the filmmaker. It was a signal to “Narnia” fans that Gerwig’s take on Lewis’ novels would be unlike any they’ve seen before and provides hope that the film will be the big hit the streamer has been searching for.
One former Hollywood executive’s advice to Peter Rice? Do more of that. Do things that people don’t expect Netflix to do.
“Talent respects and likes [Rice]. He’ll get Danny Boyle over there,” the person said. “But they need to break off some of those billions and spend them on marketing. They’re the CBS of streaming platforms now. You don’t need big swings; you need taste. They need to make Netflix cool again.”
Sharon Waxman, Umberto Gonzalez and Drew Taylor contributed reporting to this story.
