Peter Rice, a veteran executive from the television and film industry, is set to take on Netflix Inc.'s top creative role, a leadership change the company is making as it works to address a period of softer audience numbers and revenue. His career background included a stint as chairman of general entertainment at Walt Disney Co., with an earlier posting as president of 21st Century Fox rounding out his executive history.

Starting on Oct. 26, his portfolio will span scripted and unscripted series, film, and live events across every region, under a wide-ranging set of responsibilities tied to the new position. Rice is taking over the role that Bajaria held at Netflix, where she spent roughly a decade and came to represent the public side of the company's programming choices.

The leadership overhaul, combined with the elimination of roughly 1,000 positions — about 6% of total staff — points to a company navigating a period of adjustment after subscriber growth plateaued and its share price fell. Worldwide, the platform has accumulated an account base exceeding 325 million paid subscribers.

Originally a platform built around prestige drama — with House of Cards and The Crown among its flagship productions — the service has since expanded its reach across sports, short-form video, and other entertainment categories, pulling in viewers on every continent.

The appointment of Rice to the new post reflects a calculation by Netflix's top brass that his longstanding ties to Hollywood talent — alongside a track record overseeing a wide array of channels and streaming platforms — make him well suited to the demands of the position. His television oversight role — spanning tenures at both Fox and Disney — brought a string of long-running series to air, stretching from The Simpsons through to Modern Family.

Viewership for a number of Netflix titles has trended downward once those shows move into their follow-up runs. Emmy Award tallies for the platform dropped in 2026 to their lowest point in a decade. By the time after-hours trading opened, the stock had already lost around 23% of its worth over the course of the year, then edged down a further 1.1%.

At a Bloomberg Screentime conference held in Los Angeles the previous month, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told attendees that the streaming company's growth rate had fallen short of his own targets.

Bajaria's tenure drew recognition for widening Netflix's content range — notably through growth in unscripted programming and a licensing arrangement with TKO Group Holdings Inc. that brought WWE's weekly Raw broadcast onto the platform. In a written statement, Sarandos described Rice as someone whose career had been built around helping talent produce their finest output and whose grasp of narrative resonance set him apart among operators working at the scale of the entertainment industry. Separately, though live sports and podcasts have drawn growing portions of Netflix's attention, films, television series, and video games continue to absorb the bulk of a programming budget that runs to roughly $20 billion.

Bajaria's departure marks a shift at Netflix, an analyst at Wedbush Securities noted by email, adding that Rice — who carries a strong reputation across the industry — stands well-positioned for the platform's move toward more varied content, a trajectory the analyst described as progress or at minimum a change in course.

Pointing to Rice's earlier work shepherding Fox's entertainment assets through their absorption into Disney, a portion of analysts have raised the possibility that Netflix may look to expand through acquisition — with NBCUniversal, once it becomes available, drawn into that speculation — given that a bid for Warner Bros. fell short against Skydance Corp. The transaction with Discovery Inc. had closed earlier that same year.