Alfonso Cuarón Is the Latest Film Director Whose Work Is Wasted on Streaming TV — In Review

The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of In Review by David Ehrlich, a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie worlds. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.

There was a rumor that caught my attention earlier this week — not because it was interesting, but rather because of how interesting it should have been. 

The rumor: David Fincher’s long-gestating “Squid Game” movie — first reported on three years ago, but technically still a rumor itself — has mutated into a Netflix series that Fincher will direct in late 2025. The reasons why this little nugget should’ve perked my ears up are pretty obvious, and they begin with the fact that Fincher remains one of America’s most compelling filmmakers, even and especially when it’s hard to wrap your head around his choice of projects. (His post-“Social Network” pivot from towering prestige fare to airplane novel adaptations only started to make sense when I saw how much dread he managed to steep into “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”) “Mank” and “The Killer” may have been short on staying power, but they’re both fascinating objects on their own terms.

And yet, the reasons why this rumor made so little impression on me — and seemingly on the rest of the people who read it, to judge by its lack of traction — are maybe even more obvious. For one thing, the tidbit came from an “insider” Patreon I’d never heard of, and while that might say more about my reading habits than it does the writer’s credibility, the fact remains that it’s not a fact. For another, Fincher taught Luca Guadagnino and Guillermo del Toro everything they know about getting attached to projects that never get off the ground. 

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But the realest and most relevant reason why I couldn’t really have cared less about this is that I just finished streaming all seven episodes of Alfonso Cuarón’s awful “Disclaimer,” and I just don’t have the heart to invest any more hope in the promise of another major auteur — one of the few whose name is still powerful enough to greenlight original films at the studio level — devoting several of their best years to a TV show. Not when so many of those series end up betraying the singular talents of the people who made them. 

It’s true, of course, that Fincher has already defied the odds; “Mindhunter” proved that his icy glaze can stretch over multiple seasons of television without thawing, and the fact that he only directed se7en of the series’ episodes makes for an excellent case-study in how a director can set the tone for a show without fully being consumed by it. In the event that any of this “Squid Game” stuff is real, it’s entirely possible that it becomes another exception to the “House of Cards” rule that has come to define the relationship between marquee filmmakers and streaming TV. Then again, let’s not forget who directed the first two episodes of “House of Cards.” 

I’m not saying that “Squid Game: America” or whatever would definitely be bad, all I’m saying is that it’s almost impossible for me to get excited by the prospect that it could possibly be good. Somehow we’ve gotten to a place — and fast — where a massive tech company giving a great film artist infinite amounts of money to make a long-form mosaic of some kind tends to trigger more indifference than enthusiasm.

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