Sep 28, 2022
Swedish streaming service Draken Film is carving out a niche for itself in the market, going up against industry giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+. Building on its USP of quality films, it has created the ‘Bad Movie Index’ - a real-time, stock-market style analysis of how many people are watching bad movies on the world’s most popular streaming sites. Bad movies, in this case, are decided by scores on popular review sites.
The subscription price of the service then changes along with the index, so that the higher the amount of people watching bad cinema, the lower the cost of Draken’s ‘good’ cinema platform is (prices range from $3.3 to $12.5). They’re offering exclusively critically acclaimed films, with a much higher number of female-directed films, produced across more countries than competing services.
So what?
In a highly saturated market where there’s little room for branching away from the norm, how do you find your niche? Draken’s answer to this question is to create a new subscription model, which basically turns a promotional discount into a way to help audiences discover ‘better’ films. The model is unique, attention-catching, and tries to bring ‘real’ film fans together.
Draken is building a community of cinema lovers, drawing in people that want a step up from streaming bad movies (and at the same time differentiates its subscribers from the Netflix-subscribing, bad-movie bingeing others). At the same time, it’s a fun concept that stops just short of being too snobby to enjoy.
The Bad Movie Index itself shows a drop in the Index (increased bad-movie-bingeing) a few weeks ago, coinciding with the election victory of Sweden’s far-right party. Plenty of research shows the links between pop culture and political sentiment, and it’s interesting to see how the Swedish streaming behaviours match current events. In a time of long-lasting political instability (stable instability), it is worth asking if the model is profitable. Or will bad-movie watching go down when people adjust to the instability once more?