Outlander notes: Caitriona Balfe BTS photo; Starz boss on Netflix
For starters, who wouldn’t love a fun new behind-the-scenes photo featuring Caitriona Balfe? With her sunglasses on, there’s something rather funny about a 20th-century character wearing 21st-century eyewear while dressed in an 18th-century outfit. (Of course, this is Caitriona rather than Claire Fraser doing a little bit of something to protect her vision while on the set of the hit show.)
Caitriona, like the rest of the cast, wrapped up filming for season 5 prior to the holidays last year, and now we’re all in the midst of a waiting game to check out new installments. The show is going to return to Starz when we get around to February 16 and we’re hoping for some great stuff along the way. For now, though, let’s just cross our fingers and hope for some more cool stuff to cross our path until then.
Is Starz happy with Outlander on Netflix?
While we do think that a lot of viewers are happy to watch it on the streaming service, we’ve suggested for a while now that Starz isn’t off somewhere doing cartwheels about it, most likely. It’s easy to imagine that they are not especially thrilled that the show is finding an audience away from their service. What this means is that theoretically, there could be people out there who will just wait for future seasons to arrive on Netflix, a service they already have, as opposed to subscribing to Starz. Sure, they may have to wait years, but the point is nonetheless the same.
This very thing was confirmed by Starz boss Jeffrey Hirsch, who said the following to Entertainment Weekly:
To be honest, I don’t like the passionate fan base for one of our two biggest shows spending any of their viewing time with any other service but Starz. That was a deal that was done before my time here at Starz. But again, Sony owns the rights to that show. It’s probably why Starz, on a going-forward basis, looks to own all rights so we’re not in the situation where we can’t exploit a wonderful show all over the world. At the time, we were a domestic business and didn’t really have any twinkle in our eye about being a global subscription video on-demand service. Four years later we are in 50 countries around the world and continue to be the fastest growing OTT premium service domestically. It would have been amazing to have Outlander as a global show for the service.
So really, don’t expect future Starz series to continue along this model. They don’t get to make as much off of Outlander globally as they do some other shows, but we definitely think that they are still rather thrilled to have it.
Excited for Outlander season 5 to arrive?
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Photo: Starz