Netflix Film Chief Dan Lin Is Out as the Leadership Shakeup Widens

Netflix has removed the executive who ran its movie business. Dan Lin, the chairman of Netflix Film, is out of the job, Variety reported on Monday, October 19. People close to the company told Variety that Lin was let go at the start of the weekend and was set to speak to his teams on Monday before leaving.

Netflix has not named a replacement. A company spokesperson had no immediate comment on Monday, according to reports of the exit. The film job is now open less than three years after Lin took it, and the search for a successor starts in the middle of the deepest round of cuts the company has made in years.

The latest exit in a hard week

The move lands at the end of a rough stretch inside Netflix. On Wednesday, October 14, co-chief executives Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters told staff the company would cut about 1,000 jobs, roughly 6 percent of its workforce and its biggest layoff since 2022. The Orbit Post reported that round of cuts last week.

Chief content officer Bela Bajaria was then pushed out after close to ten years at the company. Peter Rice, a former Disney television executive and former head of Fox Searchlight, was named to replace her. Bajaria had helped bring Lin to Netflix, and she was the executive he reported to.

Lin's own team went before he did. In the days ahead of his exit, the layoffs took his deputy Doug Belgrad and Sheroum Kim, who ran the indie side of the film unit. Other senior television executives were also cut in the same round.

The producer hired to fix Netflix movies

Lin joined Netflix in April 2024, taking over from Scott Stuber, who had run the film division since 2017. Lin came from Rideback, the production company he founded, which built the Lego movie series and made the It films and the Sherlock Holmes movies. Before that he spent close to a decade as a production executive at Warner Bros. Pictures.

His brief was to make Netflix films better and cheaper. He reorganized the film unit by genre rather than by budget, and a New York Times profile credited him with greenlighting or acquiring 88 movies during his time in the job. The slate he leaves behind includes Apex, The Rip and Remarkably Bright Creatures, and two planned big screen releases, Greta Gerwig's Narnia film and a David Fincher Cliff Booth film, both set for IMAX runs before they stream.

The weekend told its own story about how fast this moved. Lin attended the Academy Museum Gala on Saturday and was seen on Sunday evening at a screening of La Bola Negra on the Netflix campus, hours after, by Variety's account, he had already been let go.

What happens to the film slate

Industry reports said Rice would watch over the film unit until a permanent chief is named, but Netflix has not confirmed that plan. Whoever takes the job inherits Lin's slate, his genre based structure and the same order he worked under: fewer misses, tighter budgets, and films that hold subscribers.

For viewers, nothing changes this week. The movies Lin approved will still arrive on the service over the next two years. The fight is over who picks the ones after that, and how much Netflix is willing to spend on them.