Netflix Veterans Say Ted Sarandos Has ‘Gone Hollywood’

After 1,000 layoffs and Bela Bajaria's exit, a group of mostly former executives hopes Reed Hastings will press the Netflix board.

Mostly former Netflix executives have been hiking Griffith Park and gathering at a Hollywood hotel to complain that the company has gone Hollywood. Their target is co-CEO Ted Sarandos, and their line about him, Deadline reported Tuesday in its column The Dish, is “Ted has gone Hollywood.”

The group, which Deadline says includes some current executives, has come together against Sarandos' strategy in the month since Netflix cut about 1,000 jobs, pushed out chief content officer Bela Bajaria and handed her job to former Disney executive Peter Rice. What it doesn't have is a leader, and so far it hasn't moved directly against Sarandos.

So the talk has turned to who could carry the complaint to co-founder Reed Hastings. Three Netflix veterans keep coming up: Cindy Holland, who later ran Paramount+; Lisa Nishimura, the former documentary and indie film chief; and Todd Yellin, the former head of product. None of the three is formally part of the group, according to Deadline.

Yellin is seen as the likeliest to get Hastings' attention. Their friendship goes back to 2006 at the streamer, and it's personal as well as professional: in July 2025, Hastings took the first producer credit of his life on 52nd State, a thriller Yellin directed and co-wrote.

Deadline describes two camps. One is rattled by the stock, which is down more than 45% from a year ago and closed Tuesday at $63.26. The other camp, and its sources say this is the sorer point, mourns the old kill-or-be-killed culture. In their telling, a company that once ran on performance now runs on politics: who's close to Sarandos and who shares his taste for prestige shows, big names and Old Hollywood.

That old culture really was unsentimental. Hastings liked to call Netflix a championship sports team rather than a family, a place where coaches make changes, The Hollywood Reporter noted, though the company mostly avoided mass cuts, and October's were its first layoffs in four years. So the dissenters don't object to a coach making changes. They object to who, in their telling, gets to stay.

“Ted's not the pope; the job's not for life,” one ex-Netflix vice president told Deadline. That executive described a scenario in which a share price under $60 and a weak awards season could turn the grumbling into open questions about Sarandos' leadership. The books don't look like a crisis, though: almost no debt and 31% operating margins, Deadline reported. A well-placed person told the outlet that the shake-up was meant to steady the business, not to lift the shares.

For Los Angeles, there's a question underneath the culture fight: how much of actual Hollywood a supposedly Hollywood-minded Netflix wants. In his memo on Bajaria's exit, Sarandos told staff he saw a chance to take the slate further, especially in the U.S. and Canada, THR reported. But the streamer's purchase of Radford Studio Center, the Studio City lot where Seinfeld was shot, still hasn't closed.

Netflix rents more than 700,000 square feet of Hollywood offices and production space from Hudson Pacific Properties, and that landlord's CEO, Victor Coleman, told investors on an earnings call that Netflix might close Radford later in the year, “or not,” TheWrap reported. Netflix pushed back through a spokesperson, who told TheWrap the purchase is on schedule and hitting the milestone dates both sides set. TheWrap also reported that the company is sizing up how much L.A. studio space it really needs, and the lot's fate is still open.

The dissenters' plan is early and has a lot of moving parts. A heavy hitter would convince Hastings that Netflix needs new leadership, and Hastings would then take that case to the board, which Jay Hoag leads, according to Deadline.

Hastings stepped down as executive chairman in June. On Kara Swisher's podcast on Oct. 25, days after an Oct. 20 earnings call that sent the stock lower in after-hours trading, he said he'd like to be in the fray but that capable people were running Netflix and “they'll figure it out,” Deadline reported. Hastings didn't respond to Deadline's request for comment, and Netflix gave Deadline no comment. A source close to the company told Deadline there are no plans for him to return.

Source: Deadline, retrieved November 11, 2026. Other sources: The Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap.