Reed Hastings to Become Netflix’s Executive Chairman, Ceding Co-Chief Role

On Wednesday, Netflix announced that its 2023 film slate would feature 49 movies, including animated and foreign-language films. That is down from 2022, when the company’s ambitions to release a film a week resulted in 61 English-language, live action titles; five animated features; three anime films; and 17 live-action movies in other languages.

Highlights for 2023 include a David Fincher thriller, “The Killer,” starring Michael Fassbender; Zack Snyder’s sci-fi epic “Rebel Moon”; and David Yates’s “Pain Hustlers,” starring Emily Blunt, which the company bought out of the Cannes Film Festival last year for a reported $50 million. Netflix is also making good on its intent to franchise its content with second iterations of “Murder Mystery” and “Extraction” also set to debut in 2023.

Netflix, which was once unchallenged in the video-streaming market, has faced increased competition from deep-pocketed rivals like Disney, Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery, companies that it used to rely on for programming. That competition, combined with an increasingly saturated U.S. market, has encouraged Netflix to seek subscribers in international markets, crack down on password-sharing and introduce its advertising plan.

In its letter to shareholders, Netflix said it hoped to increase its subscribers through new initiatives like “paid sharing,” which allows subscribers to add users to accounts for an additional fee.

Netflix also cited the success of its recent programs, including the series “Wednesday” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” a movie that it screened in a limited number of theaters in the United States before its debut on Netflix. In its last quarter, Netflix also began streaming “The Pale Blue Eyes,” a period-piece detective mystery starring Christian Bale and Harry Melling.

Mr. Hastings, who had already successfully founded a company called Pure Software, helped found Netflix in 1997 with Marc Randolph as a movie rental-by-mail service. The two put in place a corporate culture of “radical honesty” to the extent that in 1998, Mr. Hastings made a PowerPoint presentation to Mr. Randolph detailing the reasons he was no longer fit to remain chief executive.