2 - Mexican Cinema vs. Mexican Streaming: Four Films of Omar Chaparro

Summary

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN

On December 30, 2019, Mexican national daily El Universal reported on Netflix's most successful projects of the year in feature film and series. The headline translates as “Entertainment Made in Mexico: The Most Popular on Netflix.” Although, as journalist Ariel León Luna notes, the streaming giant releases few figures or details of its audiences and gives no hint as to its methodology, its list is emblematic of a newly fluid relation among media, territories, and genres.

Indeed, one popular actor (Omar Chaparro) stars in a high-rated feature film, a reality competition, and children's programming, suggesting a convergence between three genres once held to be distinct. Chaparro's Como caído del cielo (“As If Fallen from Heaven”) came third in the streamer's ranking for features in 2019, even though it was released only on December 24 of that year. El Universal's piece is run under a romantic photo of him and his co-star Ana Claudia Talancón close dancing in what appears to be pretty period costume.

Just one month later academic journal Comunicación y Sociedad also published an article on Netflix's productions in Mexico, this one called “Mexican Melodramas in the Age of Netflix: Algorithms for Cultural Proximity.” While the latter term is taken from Joseph D. Straubhaar, the former refers to Netflix's service model: an algorithm that shapes all aspects of the streamer's production and reception, giving Netflix detailed information about its subscribers and offering them in turn personalized recommendations based on individual interaction with the platform, such as viewing history. In her article, scholar Elia Margarita Cornelio-Marí gives an account of the streamer's “localization for the Mexican market” (5) and the “development of local content” (8). In her survey of the production of series (she does not deal with feature films), she focuses on the platform's apparent lovehate relationship with the classic Mexican genre of melodrama. This, she claims, serves as a method of achieving closeness to Netflix's middle-class spectators, who may feel contemptuous about an overfamiliar mode of television fiction, which requires them to adopt an “ironic” attitude to these new titles (17).