Breakfast With Netflix: Squid Game, Duffer Bros. and More

What I saw at the streamer's 2025 press preview

There are never good times for your car to break. Especially since good mechanics are among the few services available in this country that are not remotely concerned with convenience. They open at zero dark thirty, close before the average workday is done, and in rural areas, can be fully booked up to two weeks in advance.

That said, the day before two press events I really wanted to attend was some supremely bad timing, though it would have been worse if it happened on the way. A quick run to the drug store, and the check engine light comes on, the skid light comes on, and most oddly, the cruise control light, flashing green. If you know what that means, please share in comments.

Right about now, you may be going, WTF, LYT? We clicked on this story for news and you're going into some Harry Knowles bullshit about your day? What is this, a recipe?

Well, no. But here's the deal: Netflix provided everyone a full transcript of their event, and all the same pictures, to ensure that everyone offers up basically the same coverage. I'll tell you what you want to know, but I'll tell it my way. I don't write press releases...though I would for the right price.

Netflix is currently in their More Money Than God phase, which allowed them to throw a fancy holiday party last month – one weirdly held to two hours, which encourages fast consumption of the free food and drink. This morning's announcement of the year's slate – with the exception of animation, which had its own rollout event no long ago – was equally lavish but much longer. Nobody was rushed out, and the breakfast foods didn't stop coming (though the best one, chicken and waffles, did seem to run out first).

No photos were allowed – indeed, stickers were applied to all our phone cameras. Netflix's own photographers got pretty much everything anyway, and better than I could have, but it meant no selfies with the pink Squid Game guards. The other celebrities, as far as I could tell, did not mingle, but props to the pink guards for having their body language and coordination down. Without guns they're a lot less scary, though.

I've seen ebbs and flows in party spending before, and know that there will probably come a day when Netflix's parties may not be so great, but for now, let 'em spend! They own the Egyptian Theatre where it all happens, which presumably allows them to maximize the food and drink budget. And give swag bags, which used to be de rigeur at all Hollywood parties but these days come pretty sparsely.

We all took our seats in the auditorium, which was surprisingly not too packed, ready for a global livestream that would also include some things just for us in the room – special clips, and a bonus Q&A.

Regarding the clips, Netflix has requested that I “not include any details, plot points or spoilers featured,” so I will be limited to vague general impressions. Of course I took good notes that I now can't use, but it puts everyone reporting on the event on equal ground, at least. So again, you want just-the-facts? The trades were there. You want my personality injected into it? Well, I presume that's what you're here for. One thing I tried to do when I was at Topless Robot was not duplicate other publications as much as I was able, and honestly? As good a strategy as that seems for readers, it's bad for traffic. Writing about the same things everyone else does brings more hits. I don't really have to care about that, but nor do I have to worry that I'm duplicating everyone else too much. I'm pathologically incapable of that anyway.

The event kicked off with chief content officer Bela Bajaria declaring her love for L.A., and west coast rap, thanking the first responders and pledging that L.A. will rebuild. After that, WWE's CM Punk and Rhea Bloody Ripley came out to kick off the star-power cameos. I guess Rhea Bloody Ripley is her official trademarked name now like Seth Freakin' Rollins – since they're on Netflix with no censors, Punk should just rename himself CM Fuckin' Punk, as that would certainly move some T-shirts. Punk was in a full suit, and while Rhea was in black, she didn't go full goth with the makeup, a look I'm sure some people prefer. My attitude has always been that casual Rhea looks good and full goth Rhea looks good – it's the in-between version who wore white and had the fauxhawk with braids that looked awkward as hell. Punk in a shiny suit looks like a Ken doll whose head got popped off and replaced with a wrestling figure custom cranium.

Rhea praised Netflix synergy, like how, “Richard Gadd from Baby Reindeer — who is a huge WWE fan — was ringside for the first Raw on Netflix.” Punk pretended to nearly ruin a surprise cameo for later, because his actual past as a guy who goes off-script in live interviews now has to be milked as a gag gimmick forever. They didn't reveal anything about WWE programming, but did give Bela a replica belt and nickname, “The Bulldog.” If I believed in ghosts, I'd say Dynamite Kid's spirit might leap out of the grave to take issue. Fortunately, dead people don't do that.

Then came the Netflix promo reel, which I can share now, featuring references to all their most super-popular stuff:

Bajaria came back, doing a metaphorical victory lap for all of Emilia Perez's Oscar nominations, and rebuking an NYT headline reading, “Is Creativity Dead?” They're framing themselves as the studio that does original stuff, saying, “We've never been afraid to take big, bold swings” and “We can't be just one thing with 700 million viewers.” To prove their diversity, she showed slides of Emilia Perez at the Golden Globes side by side with WWE Raw the next night, and the NFL on Christmas Day contrasting with Squid Game 2 the next day. Their slogan for this year is “You’re not ready for what's next.” A hundred new shows not in English will include The Leopard, Last Samurai Standing, and the animated Asterix & Obelix. (Seriously, it's about time Asterix adaptations made it stateside. In Europe we grew up with that, along with Tintin.)

Guillermo Del Toro beamed in from the Frankenstein room in his house, which has a giant Frankenstein head as well as full-body waxworks of Jack Pierce applying makeup to Boris Karloff. He's just a little obsessed. He also looks like he's been on Ozempic, not necessarily a skinny guy, but compared to when I first met him years ago at the Sunset Five, he looks like he's dropped the equivalent of a mini-fridge. Maybe Jeffrey Wells can like his movies now.

“I’ve been trying to make it for 20-25 years. In fact, some people may even think I am a little bit obsessed with Frankenstein. And they probably would be right. You see, over the decades, the character has fused with my soul in a way that it has become an autobiography. It doesn’t get more personal than this.”

Since I can't “spoil” the clip we saw, I'll say its visual style reminded me of Crimson Peak, and the monster design reminded me more of the book than most. Is that vague enough?

Next up: Nananananana batfleck! Ben Affleck and his perfectly groomed beard came to talk about his new movie with, yep, you guessed it, Matt Damon. Directed and co-written by Joe Carnahan, it's called Rip, which is what police call it when they keep money they find at a crime scene. An all-star cast includes Sasha Calle, Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Adkins, and Kyle Chandler, and Carnahan apparently set a goal of making a genre classic like Seven or Heat.

We saw a trailer, and in the broadest strokes – it looks like part of the movie takes place in a confined location, then opens up for some action sequences. There are some good hooks in the confined part, and the A-listers look on their game. Here's hoping. Affleck works best when a director pushes him.

John Mulaney came out next to talk about his new 12-week live talk show, and look, the man's a genius at speaking, so I'm just gonna quote from the transcript here. Imagine it in his voice.

“Hello. Good evening, everybody. And by evening, I mean morning because it's nine o'clock in the morning. This is the least exciting, least show-bizzy time of the day. I'm so happy to be here. It's an honor and a favor to be standing here today. This is an obligation that I hope will pay off down the road and for Netflix and, in 2025.

I have to say of all the DVD mail order businesses that pivoted, I think Netflix is in the top one or two, Red Box being a close second. Red Box actually offered me more money to do a show, but I told them to stick it. I'm a Netflix guy. I'm not going to premiere in front of supermarkets no matter how much you offer me.

In May of 2024 before everything happened, Netflix came to me; in the before times, Netflix came to me. Robbie Praw and Bela, who I've worked with many, many times and had so much fun with, said that we wanted to do a six-night pop-up live show during the Netflix is A Joke Festival. I agreed to it because it was six nights and then it was over, and I love things that will be over.

We had a blast. We had many comedians who were in town for the festival. We had lots of guests. We had a hypnotist. We had an expert on coyotes in Los Angeles. We had a palm tree expert. We had an earthquake expert. We covered most all natural disasters that take place in California, except for one. We just weren't ready.

So Netflix and I discussed this summer not being done with the show and I was thrilled to do that. It was a total blast and it was one of those shows that neither Netflix nor I really needed to do. I never wanted to host a talk show and they were getting out of the talk show game. So it was the perfect moment to do this.

I'm thrilled to announce that starting March 12th, I will be doing a live show called Everybody's Live with John Mulaney for 12 weeks in a row once a week. We will be live globally with no delay. We will never be relevant. We will never be your source for news. We will always be reckless. Netflix will always provide us with data that we will ignore.

This will be the one place where you could see Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting next to Nikki Glaser sitting next to a family therapist with music by Mannequin Pussy. That's just a brief sampling of guests. We don't know if we can lock in Mannequin Pussy, but we are in talks with them.

This is a really fun experiment. Not since Harry and Meghan has Netflix given more money to someone without a specific plan.

Joining me on stage during the show will be our robot, Saymo, one of those West Hollywood delivery cart robots. We're having trouble finding Saymo, so we just keep ordering Shastas and ginger ales and hoping that he'll roll up. Richard Kind will be joining me again for this series, Everybody Live With John Mulaney. Richard and I met through a real-life Baby Reindeer scenario. He kept showing up where I worked and I decided to incorporate him into my life.

I think that this show will be something that people will want to tune into live. We will have a host in a suit taking calls from viewers. It's Netflix's commitment to embracing the 20th century. There is absolutely nothing new about what I'm doing but, by taking a lot of elements other people have already done and doing them out of order, it feels new and that's what's important.

If we can be one-tenth as popular on Netflix as anything from South Korea, I will have the most successful talk show in world history.”

In documentaries, they'll have Spike Lee doing one on Hurricane Katrina, Ridley Scott doing a Black Hawk Down doc, an Eddie Murphy documentary, a new film from the makers of My Octopus Teacher, and a Posh Spice series. We saw a clip from that one and, in broad strokes, it focused on one particular aspect of her life, though in conversations with a Netflix rep afterwards I was assured it would cover all aspects, not just the thing we saw in the clip.

For comedy, besides the obvious Happy Gilmore 2, Mindy Kaling will direct a new show starring Kate Hudson, Amy Schumer stars in Kinda Pregnant, about a woman who dons a fake baby bump to get attention from everyone, Lena Dunham's going to do a new series, and Tina Fey will remake the old Alan Alda movie The Four Seasons as an eight-part miniseries, starring “Steve Carell, Will Forte, me, Kerri Kinney-Silver, the beautiful Italian actor Marco Calvani, Broadway’s Erika Henningsen and Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo.”

“In the original, Alan Alda and Carol Burnett played husband and wife and I remember feeling, like, 'What?! My two favorite comedy people from other shows are pretending to be married?! What is this deep comfort I’m feeling?!' It was fan fiction before there was fan fiction. It was Nancy Meyers sweater porn before Nancy Meyers… found her career in porn.”

We saw a clip featuring Fey, Forte, and Carell. Hard to tell much from it without revealing anything at all, but I can say they aren't straying far from their familiar personae, so far.

For drama, a show from the UK called Adolescence will unfold in real-time, single-shot episodes, about a 13 year-old accused of murder. And Judy Blume's oft-banned novel Forever... will get a race-flipped adaptation, with Katherine and Michael now called Keisha and Justin. The trailer didn't really have any spoilers, but set a tone that felt both lustful and sad, which seems appropriate.

Death by Lightning will chronicle the relationship between President James Garfield and the man who kills him, while The Beast in Me deals with the rich and powerful getting away with things. (So the challenge there is make it more entertaining than the actual news, I guess.)

Zero Day has Robert De Niro as a former president of the U.S. investigating a disastrous cyber-attack that left many dead. Black Rabbit casts Jude Law and Justin Bateman as brothers in trouble with the law, with Troy Kotsur (CODA) seemingly playing the main villain. We saw clips of these two – Zero Day looks more compelling of the two, while Black Rabbit seems like an American Guy Ritchie flick with less humor.

In gaming news, Netflix will be the exclusive home of WWE 2K mobile games, as well as new games based on Ginny and Georgia, and also Sweet Magnolias, Love is Blind and Outer Banks.

A behind-the-scenes reel for Stranger Things 5 really didn't reveal anything much, except perhaps one key location? Can't spoil that, obviously. But I don't think it would help anyone's theories to know.

The Duffer brothers came out, to reveal they spent a year shooting 650 hours of footage. It's “super-intense and emotional” and there was “so much crying.” It will mark the end of these characters' stories, but there are “many more stories to tell” in the Stranger Things universe. The First Shadow play, about Vecna's backstory, is coming to Broadway in March, and there's “more in the works.”

They're also producing two new shows that, in their style, once again depict real, regular folks encountering weird things – The Boroughs involves seniors in a retirement home, and stars Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, and Bill Pullman. (Jeebus, they should not be old enough for a retirement home!)

The other one is called Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and it's a horror story set during the lead-up to a wedding. If you've had one with a long lead, I think you know just how much potential there is for horror here.

Finally: SQUID GAME! Lights flashed pink as the guards came out onstage. We got a brief new clip, and I think probably all I can say is it depicted a new team sorting mechanism. The big news is the date for season 3, which is JUNE 27.

The livestream ended there, but we got a brief Q&A with Bela.

How will Building the Band address the death of Liam Payne? Nothing to announce yet, but they have been talking with his family.

Annoying audience member ostensibly covering as press wants to know how the pick their projects, then announces she's a writer who would love to get involved. A boilerplate answer about teams around the world, and great ideas from filmmakers that come in the door.

How do they make schedules, and does live TV change that? They want to have enough new and different things to create conversations, and live doesn't change that.

Does Netflix not buying much this Sundance indicate a change in strategy? No. If they find something great, they will buy it. And some conversations are still ongoing.

With Greta Gerwig's Narnia movie getting an Imax release, will there be anything sooner, like maybe GDT's Frankenstein? “Each movie is case by case for limited runs.”

Why are some seasons split? Sometimes they're written that way with natural break points; others, like during COVID, are just them wanting to get some episodes out sooner. No comment yet on what Stranger Things 5 will do.

That was it for the presentation – breakfast was a lot of hors d'hoeuvres plates, including mini quiches, avocado toast, and tater tots.

The weirdly grainy donuts were surprisingly nice.

(All images courtesy of Netflix)