How Much Did Seinfeld Make From Hulu – “People don’t refuse money – that’s what separates us from the animals,” declared Jerry Seinfeld as his character on a 1991 episode of Seinfeld. At that point, Seinfeld himself was making a comfortable $40,000 per episode as the lead of his two-year-old sitcom, which had recently cracked the Top 50 in the Nielsen ratings.
Three decades later, Jerry Seinfeld has had more opportunities to turn down money than his character could have ever dreamed of. Seinfeld was a huge hit while on the air – earning the comedian $267 million in 1998 alone – and then raked in billions after that year’s finale, first through record-breaking syndication deals, and now as a streaming juggernaut . On October 1, the sitcom arrives on Netflix globally as part of a five-year deal reportedly worth north of $500 million, thanks to its persistent observational humor and the growing streaming war where TV shows classical are used as essential weapons. . Here’s how the ’90s sitcom has continued to rake in profits – and how it fits into a rapidly changing TV ecosystem.
How Much Did Seinfeld Make From Hulu
Given that Seinfeld is a famous show about nothing – it mainly depicts four friends from New York City sitting around, complaining and undermining each other – it’s not particularly surprising that the show has struggled to win over initially audiences and executives alike. The sitcom, co-created by Seinfeld and Larry David, premiered on NBC in July 1989 — usually a month for networks to dump minor projects — and was originally picked up for only four episodes. The second season received such poor ratings that it was put on hiatus for two months.
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But with the beloved Cheers in the lead, Seinfeld quickly became one of America’s most popular sitcoms. By the show’s ninth and final season, Seinfeld was the number one show, according to Nielsen, making an estimated $200 million a year for NBC. Jerry Seinfeld was taking $1 million per episode – a far cry from that early $40,000 – and his three main co-stars (Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine, Jason Alexander as George and Michael Richards as Kramer) pocketed $600,000 per episode. The show’s finale was watched by 76.3 million viewers, almost matching the ratings for that year’s Super Bowl.
He could have easily continued his amazing run—in fact, NBC offered to raise Seinfeld’s salary from $1 million to $5 million per episode. But he turned down the offer, saying he wanted to focus more on his personal life. (A few years later, Seinfeld would betray Larry King on air for not knowing his show wasn’t cancelled.)
Over Seinfeld’s run in the 90s, the television landscape was changing thanks to the mass adoption of cable. By the end of the decade, nearly 80% of American homes had access to cable, with channels such as HBO and MTV establishing themselves as cultural hubs for more niche audiences. Executives sensed that the era of the popular network sitcom was winding down, making the tried and tested hits even more valuable. In 1998, Turner Broadcasting paid a record amount—over $1 million per episode—to air reruns of Seinfeld on TBS. “This may be the last hit sitcom to ever come off the networks,” TBS President Bill Burke told the New York s.
Seinfeld reruns continued to earn solid Nielsen ratings. By 2010, the show had earned $2.7 billion in reruns, according to Barry Meyer, chairman of Warner Brothers Entertainment. Typically, syndication deals drop or end after a show loses cultural relevance — but in 2019, Viacom was still willing to pay an estimated $200,000 to $250,000 per episode for the rights to broadcast the show on cable.
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These reruns – which totaled 180 episodes – made many people very rich, including Donald Trump’s former right-hand man, Steve Bannon, who had worked in the entertainment business for a time in the 90s and won a part in the show. “We calculated what it would get us if it got to syndication,” Bannon told Bloomberg in 2015. “We were wrong by a factor of five.”
But the show’s runaway financial success also caused tension between its stars. In 2003, Louis-Dreyfus, Richards and Alexander refused to take part in the making of a DVD series of the show because they felt they were being taken. After a conflict, Seinfeld and the producers agreed to cut the trio in on royalties.
While Seinfeld and David would probably have been comfortable making syndication money for the rest of their lives, the entertainment industry was about to change once again. In the mid-2010s, new streaming platforms invested millions of dollars to create deep libraries to attract subscribers to their folds.
In 2015, following a bidding war with players including Amazon and Yahoo, Sony Pictures Television agreed to a reported $130 to $180 million domestic deal with Hulu over six years. “I mean, you could put the DVD in, but I guess nobody wanted to,” said Jerry Seinfeld at the Hulu advance that year during the announcement.
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Apparently Netflix wasn’t too worried about not having Seinfeld in its catalog, because the streamer outshone everyone else thanks to its first mover advantage, and its comedy bench was immense, with viewers able to toggle between The Office, Friends and Cheers. But big film companies, sensing a change in the wind, started building their own streaming platforms and coming for properties they owned the original rights to. In 2019, WarnerMedia outbid Netflix by saving Friends $425 million to provide a streaming service that didn’t exist yet (HBO Max now). Likewise, NBCUniversal basically paid themselves $500 million to grab The Office for the Peacock delivery platform.
Seinfeld’s contract with Hulu expired that same year, and given that WarnerMedia partially owned the show, many prospects expected the company to mount a bid to move it to HBO Max. But Netflix banned not only them but also Amazon, Viacom and NBCUniversal.
Tim Westcott, a media analyst at OMDIA, says that Netflix gave up a staggering amount of money for Seinfeld for several reasons. “The main reason people subscribe is choice. You have to have a lot of engaging content as well as distinctive originals, where there’s no guarantee they’ll be a hit,” he said. In comparison, Seinfeld is a well-known property; it is comforting, broken into short chapters, and smaller as its jokes are based on social situations rather than historical events.
Seinfeld also has the potential to be a cross-generational draw: it could engage older, more moneyed subscribers who rewatch the show after decades, as well as a younger generation who are only familiar with the show as a landmark cultural – and perhaps willing to binge-drink all 180 episodes. In 2018, The Office and Friends were the two most watched shows from Netflix, with users watching a combined 85 billion minutes, according to Nielsen. A younger generation of viewers, most notably pop star Billie Eilish, have not been shy about their joy at discovering these long-running classics for the first time.
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The Netflix deal for Seinfeld also helps solidify their relationship with Jerry himself. The platform already had the rights to his traveling talk show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and had funded two stand-up specials, Jerry Before Seinfeld and 23 Hours to Kill. In June, Seinfeld announced that he would be working on a new Netflix movie called Unfrosted, inspired by a joke he made about Pop-Tarts.
“This Seinfeld deal could even help lead to future projects with Seinfeld himself, as well as the writers and other talent on the show,” Westcott said. “It’s a good investment for several reasons.”
Seinfeld on Netflix will need to perform well, because the lead the company had built over its competitors is closing fast. Disney + has amassed the equivalent of more than half of Netflix’s 209 million subscribers despite being available for less than two years, boosted by mainstream juggernauts like The Mandalorian and Loki. HBO Max is also coming on strong thanks to its deep back catalog of respectable TV dramas and hit movies like Godzilla vs. Kong. This year’s second quarter numbers for Netflix show that their growth has slowed significantly. Their share of global demand log, a metric created by Parrot Analytics, fell below 50% for the first , and they lost 430,000 subscribers in the US and Canada.
Netflix has also sat on the sidelines as big companies merged left and right, scrambling to amass money, talent and intellectual property. Discovery merged with WarnerMedia, while Amazon bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Westcott says Netflix’s lack of diversification makes them more vulnerable than its competitors. “Studios have other businesses to fall back on: linear channels, theatrical films, theme parks and licensing. And streaming is a very small part of the Amazon and Apple empires overall,” he said. “Netflix is a bit vulnerable because if their streaming business doesn’t continue to grow as much as it has, or if they start losing subscribers, they don’t have another business to fall back on.”
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And then there’s the concern that Seinfeld’s humor may become obsolete in a rapidly changing social media-driven world. Various
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