Netflix Shakes Up the Top: Bela Bajaria Leaves After a Decade, Former Disney Chief Peter Rice Takes Over Content

LOS ANGELES

Netflix has changed the person in charge of everything it makes. The streamer announced on Thursday that Bela Bajaria, its chief content officer since January 2023, is leaving after nearly a decade at the company, and that Peter Rice — the former chairman of Walt Disney Television who was pushed out of Disney in 2022 — will take over the job on October 26. Rice will oversee Netflix's global content organization: scripted and unscripted series, films and the live events that have become the company's newest obsession.

Executive changes at streamers are routine. This one is not, for two reasons: the size of the chair, and the week it landed in. The Netflix content chief controls one of the largest programming budgets in entertainment — the Wall Street Journal put it at roughly 20 billion dollars — and the announcement came one day after Netflix told staff it was cutting about 6 percent of its workforce, roughly 1,000 jobs, its biggest round of layoffs since 2022. A new content chief and a thousand departures in 48 hours is not a reshuffle. It is a company announcing, in two different ways, that the current formula is not working well enough.

What Bajaria built

Bajaria joined Netflix in 2016 to run unscripted programming, rose to lead local-language series and then all of television, and was named chief content officer in 2023. The hits under her tenure are the ones that defined streaming's last decade: Squid Game became a global phenomenon, Wednesday and Bridgerton turned into durable franchises, and the company pushed hard into live programming, signing multi-year partnerships with WWE and the NFL that would have been unthinkable for Netflix five years ago. Her most recent focus, colleagues say, was that live strategy — turning games and events into appointment viewing for a platform built on watching whenever.

Co-CEO Ted Sarandos thanked her publicly for a decade of work, in the warm language these statements always use. The harder context sits outside the statement: Netflix's share price has fallen sharply over the past year, engagement growth has slowed to a crawl — viewing hours grew only modestly in the first half of the year — and the pipeline of aging franchises, with Stranger Things ending and Bridgerton maturing, has not produced an obvious next wave of breakout hits. Last year the company made a run at Warner Bros. Discovery's studios and HBO Max, then walked away in February while Paramount closed its own deal for them this month. The narrative around Netflix, for the first time in years, is about what it lacks.

Who Peter Rice is

Rice's career is the opposite of a streaming native's, and that appears to be the point. He built his reputation at Fox Searchlight, the specialty studio behind a long run of acclaimed films, then ran Fox Networks Group, and then moved to Disney in its Fox acquisition, becoming chairman of Walt Disney Television and chairman of general entertainment content — overseeing the company's cable channels, news programming and major sports coverage. In June 2022, Disney's then-CEO Bob Chapek fired him abruptly, in a move widely read at the time as removing a plausible successor; Dana Walden replaced him. Rice has been without a full-time studio job since, and the knock on his candidacy — noted in trade coverage of Thursday's hire — is that he has little direct streaming experience.

What he has instead is exactly what Sarandos chose to praise: deep relationships with talent, and a long record of backing filmmakers and showrunners who did career-best work under him. Sarandos described him as one of the most effective large-scale operators in the business, with sharp business instincts and an understanding of what makes stories connect. In his own statement, Rice said Netflix had repeatedly shown a willingness to bet on distinctive voices and fresh ideas, and that he wanted to help bring more of those stories to its members. Between the lines of both statements is the same argument: that Netflix's problem is not distribution, data or money, but the hit-making itself — and that the fix is a person, not an algorithm.

Why the timing matters

Rice starts October 26, but the verdicts arrive sooner. Netflix reports third-quarter earnings on October 20, giving Wall Street its first formal chance to react to the layoffs, the leadership change and the engagement question all at once. The stock was little changed in extended trading on Thursday, which reads less like calm than like investors waiting for numbers.

For viewers, the change will be invisible for a while and then suddenly not. Content chiefs commission years ahead; the shows arriving in 2027 and 2028 will be the first chosen on Rice's watch, and the live-events strategy Bajaria was building — NFL games, WWE specials, one-off spectacles — is now his to keep, grow or quietly shrink. The streamer that taught the world to binge has decided its next chapter needs a television executive from the old world to write it. Whether that is a course correction or a contradiction is the story Hollywood will be telling itself for the next two years. More of the night's developments are in our Nightly News Wrap-Up for October 16.