Gorillaz Cancels Netflix Movie Plan — How Waiting Became the Band’s New Record
In a cluttered studio strewn with sketchbooks and demo tapes, gorillaz members Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett described stepping away from a planned Netflix film and handing the time they had been asked to spend waiting back into music. What began as a promise of creative freedom became a stretch of delay and, ultimately, a different creative product.
Why did Gorillaz cancel the Netflix movie?
Jamie Hewlett, a member of Gorillaz, said the idea of making a feature felt unappealing now: “If we’d done a movie 25 years ago, fine, but the idea of doing a movie now… it just doesn’t have… no interest in it whatsoever. No interest. It’s not an interesting idea, it’s not an original idea. ” Hewlett recalled a moment with the streaming partner in which the band was told they could do whatever they wanted and would be given money to do it, but the project slowed when the contact they had been working with left the company.
Hewlett described a chain of slow conversations and the prospect of another year of set-ups and handoffs. Faced with that prospect, the band chose to pull out rather than linger in production limbo.
How did delay shape their music?
The band turned the experience of waiting and frustration into a record. Damon Albarn, a member of Gorillaz, said the period felt like hanging around for an eternity: “I just felt like I was hanging around for what seemed an eternity. ” Jamie Hewlett summarized the creative redirection plainly: “We made an album while we were waiting, basically. ”
That album, Cracker Island, released in 2023, carried some of the frustration the pair felt while negotiations stalled. The delay that killed the movie plan became, in their words, the raw material for a record shaped by exile from a stalled film process.
What did the band say in the interview with Zane Lowe?
Gorillaz sat down with Zane Lowe of Apple Music and walked through how the stalled film and other recent events fit into the arc of the band’s work. In that conversation they described a film effort that had been announced years earlier but then languished — negotiations and personnel changes left the project stuck in limbo for about two years, and the band ultimately lost interest.
The interview also placed the decision to step away from the film alongside a broader moment in the band’s history: they debuted with a self-titled release in 2001 and later issued their ninth album, The Mountain. While grief and travel informed other recent work, the immediate creative impulse that produced Cracker Island came from the experience of waiting for the film to move forward.
Hewlett recalled that during the Netflix conversations they had “some brilliant ideas, ” but the slow pace and staff turnover made the process untenable. Albarn’s description of the feeling — of hanging around for eternity — became the conceptual seed for the 2023 record.
Back in the same studio now, sketches and audio snippets sit beside one another. The band has closed the door on that feature-length film idea for the present, channeling what might have been film time into music instead. For the gorillaz members, a stalled movie was less an endpoint than a detour that produced new work, leaving open the question of whether the pause was loss or creative opportunity.
