The future hasn’t been kind to Netflix. In the last two months, it’s launched three science fiction blockbusters – Will Smith’s orc cop adventure Bright, the shock assault The Cloverfield Paradox, and the bizarre Berlin-set Blade Runner-riff Mute – each of which critics reacted to as though a cockroach crawled out of their TV (not one film managed to score over 27% on Rotten Tomatoes). A fourth attempt, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, about five female explorers in a Technicolor hellscape, received better reviews but Netflix still couldn’t win. It scooped up the international distribution rights from Paramount, who lost confidence in the Natalie Portman cerebral chiller and decided to release it theatrically only in the United States, Canada and China. Netflix rescued the film for foreign audiences … who grumbled that they’d be forced to squint at Garland’s giant, surrealist visuals at home on Netflix.

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If Netflix could see into its own future, would it green-light each film again? Probably. It’s already given the go-ahead to Bright 2, and just awarded a first look deal to the heavyweight producer of Transformers and World War Z and snatched another major studio film from the trash bin when Universal dumped the planet invasion thriller Extinction. Plus, last Friday as Mute tested wary audiences already primed to ridicule Paul Rudd’s handlebar mustache, Netflix announced it had won an expensive nine-way bidding war to produce another costly sci-fi flick, Life Sentence, in which convicts have their brains wiped to prevent them from repeating their crimes. Directed by War for the Planet of the Apes’ Matt Reeves, Life Sentence repeats the same high-concept, name-brand fantasia that’s made Netflix duck tomatoes. And yet, the timing of the news feels pointed: Netflix knows exactly what it’s doing.

Beamed Reeves, “Netflix is at the forefront of a new age in how storytellers are reaching an audience.” Frankly, Netflix knows more than anyone about how people watch movies. However, the industry still doesn’t know much about it. Before Netflix, a film’s success or failure was gauged by three numbers: its budget, its opening weekend and its total global haul. But when Netflix launched its streaming service a decade ago, it began to hoard more sophisticated information. Who exactly wants to watch a movie about an orc – not just which broad demographic, but which specific people sitting on their couch on a Tuesday? What are the viewing patterns even subscribers don’t recognize? The key words they search, the films that make them watch other films, the scenes that make them turn a movie off?

“We know what people like to watch,” said Netflix’s chief communications officer, Jonathan Friedland, when the company began to produce its own original content in 2011. It wasn’t an empty boast. Netflix knew that there was an audience for their first show, House of Cards, because it had studied the overlap between David Fincher fans who also liked British miniseries. Plus, it didn’t have to spend a fortune blanketing the country with ads. It could directly reach specific viewers with 10 different online promos tailored to whether the target was more likely to click play for a story about a powerful woman, or for Fincher’s camerawork.

Since that first triumph, Netflix’s subscriptions have quadrupled. Today, more Americans pay for Netflix than for cable television, and after an intensive international push, over half of Netflix’s users live abroad. It’s rightly been called a disruptive force in entertainment, as though founder Reed Hasting’s legendary annoyance at being charged a $40 late rental fee for Apollo 13 had mutated into a vengeance to destroy not just video stores, but traditional Hollywood itself. Meanwhile, though we know that Apollo 13’s opening weekend box office was $25.3m, Netflix rarely trumpets financial data about its releases. Doomsaying reports claim that only 5 million viewers watched Cloverfield Paradox in its first week. But crunch the numbers, and that’s actually about as many people who bought a ticket to Apollo 13.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gugu Mbatha-Raw in The Cloverfield Paradox. Photograph: Netflix/AP

Of course, the difference is that Netflix isn’t trying to sell individual films. It wants to sell people on renewing their subscriptions – or rather, not canceling them – which is behind its strategy of taking risky swings. Sure, it’d be great if the finished film was fantastic, and the company’s investment in talented directors like Garland, Reeves and Mute’s Duncan Jones means that it has good taste. Yet, what really matters is that people are talking about its orc cop flick, even if they’re just saying it’s a legendary disaster.

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Traditional Hollywood studios struggle to sell full-price tickets to something iffy or complex like Annihilation or Extinction, an all-or-nothing push to inspire a trip to the theater, to make people make a choice. They have to scatter the film across 2,000 screens and spend major advertising money hoping the audience for it will hear, and care, that it exists. But Netflix embraces inertia. No one’s going to cancel a subscription because one movie was bad. And hey, it’s fine if all people want is to sample 15 minutes of Will Smith grunting, “Fairy lives don’t matter,” so they can join in the jokes. To Netflix, which needs less cash to reach a targeted audience – and needs far less motivation from them – its biggest danger in acquiring major studios’ cast-offs is the brand-tainting odor of being a dumpster diver.

Netflix has pledged to release 80 original films in 2018, a mix of small, quality films the company scooped up for cheap at film festivals and splashy, silly events guaranteed to get people tweeting, like the comedy Eggplant Emoji, about a teenager who loses his penis. There’s big money in giving people just enough excuses to maintain a low-risk subscription. Each month, Netflix makes nearly a half-billion in dues in America alone – that’s more than the entire domestic box office of Wonder Woman. For that money, they could make a high-profile disaster like Bright five times over, and still have enough pocket change for Oscar-nominated movies like Mudbound.

Perhaps to understand Netflix, we need to analyze their patterns just like they’ve analyzed ours. The same key words keep coming up: strange, celebrity, curiosity, conversation. What’s more likely: that Netflix can’t stop placing bad bets on costly science fiction films, or that these movies help them make money in ways the company isn’t explaining? Maybe Netflix has the future figured out after all.