Eastern Promise? Marco Polo and the Role of Medieval Drama in Netflix’s Strategy for Development in East Asia

Abstract

With an estimated reach of 183 million subscribers worldwide, Netflix remains the market leader in on-demand streaming entertainment. Part of this success is reflected through its presence in East and South-East Asian markets. To enable robust growth here, the platform has invested greatly in original content based in the region, launching a vastly popular spate of newly commissioned Japanese and Korean language dramas, whilst adopting flexible subscription models, such as mobile-only. Recent research by Media Partners Asia outlines how in countries such as Thailand and Singapore, as well as across the region more generally, ‘Netflix has benefited from robust pay subs demand across its mobile plans, with heavy consumption of its Korean, anime and Western original content.’ In terms of content provision, an intended part of Netflix’s strategy for increasing appeal to East Asian audiences has been its offering of medieval fantasy as a genre. Long the staple of cinema, both Hollywood and East Asian, recent releases have these seen this genre of historical epics shrunk down to the small screen of television and the even smaller one of mobile devices. In 2014, as the streaming wars began in earnest, Netflix released the poorly received medieval series Marco Polo (2014–2016). The series was notable for its attempts to replicate the success of the European-set medieval fantasy Game of Thrones (2011–2019), albeit with an Asian-centric setting and cast. The failure of this story about a Portuguese hero and his adventures in the court of Kublai Khan coincided with the growth and success of American produced content that placed East Asian settings and characters at the forefront of their narratives. This was especially the case in cinema through the hugely successful romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and the medieval fantasy The Great Wall (2016), an American-Chinese co-production not thematically or representationally dissimilar from Marco Polo. As Netflix comes under increasing pressure to maintain its commercial lead in the streaming wars by growing its market share in East Asian territories, its failure to co-produce successful medieval fantasies for the region raises a pertinent question for scholarly inquiry. Namely, how can we understand better the tensions in assimilating the tastes and requirements of East Asian markets with the established conventions of medieval action-adventure dramas offered by Netflix in original content such as Marco Polo? In answering that key question, this chapter seeks firstly to outline the ways in which John Fusco’s series renegotiates tropes of Hollywood’s recent medieval blockbusters, specifically those in which male stars of American cinema are placed into an East Asian setting, such as in Edward Zwick’s 2003 star-vehicle for Tom Cruise, The Last Samurai, and Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall. With those iconographic codes and narrative frameworks established, the main focus of this study will be to examine the commercial rationale behind such American co-productions, pitched at the domestic, international, and East Asian markets. The task will include comparison of the ideological representations within the television series and those extant within their marketing. In essence, I ask how did the representational and marketing strategies that underpinned Marco Polo compare with those of its cinematic contemporaries? As part of its intended conclusions, then, this chapter will consider the way forward for Netflix in reorienting its medieval dramas for a more diverse range of audiences in East Asia, one informed by the lessons from critically and commercially unsuccessful ventures such as Marco Polo.