CAA's Roeg Sutherland: Netflix Firings Too Fresh to Call, Mergers an 'Opportunity'

By Daniel Okafor

Netflix axed 1,000 employees — roughly 6% of its workforce — days before CAA's Roeg Sutherland took the stage in Rome. He has no verdict yet. Ask him in three weeks.

"To be honest, I really don't know," Sutherland said at Rome's MIA Market of the streaming giant's turbulent week. "Obviously, something's going to change, but I don't know. Ask me that question in three weeks from now, and I'll have a much better sense."

Sutherland, co-head of CAA's media finance department and its international film group, spoke Tuesday at MIA's newly launched European Investment Hub. The market runs Oct. 19–23 and is the first industry gathering since the Netflix cuts, which claimed chief content officer Bela Bajaria and head of film Dan Lin. Lin's firing was announced Monday, hours before attendees gathered for MIA's opening reception at Rome's Palazzo Barberini.

What do the mergers mean for financiers?

Sutherland was blunt on consolidation. Paramount Skydance's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — forming Skydance Corp. — may read as retreat to some. Not to him.

"In my world, mergers represent opportunity. Contraction represents opportunity. Financiers see that as a moment where people will be opportunistic," Sutherland said.

The caveat is familiar: nobody knows what the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger will produce. Sutherland noted that David Ellison has guaranteed a certain number of movies per year. How that reshapes the studios' international footprint is the open question.

"I think we'll have a much better sense in January or February," he said. "But in the U.S. market itself, it's going to present a big opportunity for new distributors to come out, new financiers to come out."

Why is CAA scouting outside the United States?

Sutherland touted CAA's commitment to "discovering new voices" — and observed that "in recent years…those voices have come from outside of the United States."

His explanation is structural, not political. European funding systems, he argued, let filmmakers tell stories that would be very difficult to finance in America.

"Not because of political reasons, but for financial reasons," Sutherland said. "We have no aid from our government in any significant way."

Can theatrical still win?

Sutherland credited Netflix and other streamers with one thing he clearly values: teaching U.S. audiences to watch global content. His exhibit is "La Bola Negra," the streamer's Spanish-language awards hopeful.

"Even for a Netflix movie, people are going out to theaters to see it," he said. He added that Netflix "will probably have an interesting question to ask themselves about what the power of theatrical is."

The macro supports him. This summer's U.S. box office was the highest-grossing of all time.

"What you've seen in the United States this summer, where audiences are actually going back in theaters and really embracing original content — for me, that's what is really interesting," Sutherland said. Whatever the mergers and retrenchments bring, he added, "the audience is just growing."

His closing standard is accountability — audiences holding the industry to quality.

"We still have a responsibility to make movies for an audience that is craving it," he said. "That audience, I think more than I have ever experienced in my career, is holding us accountable for making good movies…. And they're there to embrace them. As long as we make the right movies, they're there to embrace them."

January or February, then, is when the merger fog lifts. Until then, Sutherland is selling optimism, and the numbers from summer suggest he isn't selling it alone.