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:
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:
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.