We get bullish on Netflix (again!) … and we call bullshit on Christopher Nolan’s wealthiest critic.

Why we think that it’s the World Baseball Classic, and not dwindling Beef bingers, that best represents the platform’s bold, event-driven future

“Netflix has an engagement problem,” declared Business Insider’s Peter Kafka last week.

“Can Netflix monetize its way past an engagement plateau?,” wondered LightShed Partners.

"There is definitely some kind of slowdown, and I'm not necessarily sure management has articulated what they can do to reinvigorate the business here," Geetha Ranganathan, Bloomberg Intelligence senior media analyst, told Yahoo Finance.

With Netflix stock down 44% in the last year — 6% just since it reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday — there’s seems to be consensus that something is very wrong at Netflix.

It was Bloomberg’s story about season-to-season audience drops of more than 50% for some original series that really got the whole engagement narrative spinning the wrong direction for Netflix two weeks ago. Bloomberg described the viewership drops as a “major source of concern” for management.

Faced with the market’s suddenly brutal outlook, Netflix failed to rise to the narrative occasion … And despite only a narrow 0.01% shortfall on consensus Q2 revenue growth projections, the stock fell again.

Management seemed like it was ducking for cover, signaling that it would shroud even more of its data — specifically, publication of its bi-annual “What We Watched” viewership reports. They’ll now be put out just once a year.

We actually think this data has the potential to help Netflix’s case more than hurt it.

Looking carefully at the first-half-of-2026 Excel sheet, also released Thursday, we actually saw a more optimistic story — one about Netflix transitioning away, at least a bit, from pricy original series that take a long time to make, and into reasonably priced live events, using Netflix’s unique ability to pick and choose from a span 190 national markets to find affordable licensing opportunities with big advertising ceilings.