The Netflix show was good, but Jake Gyllenhaal and Bill Paxton were horrible in Nightcrawler.
As a TV news guy I heard a lot of non-TV people mentioning how much they loved that movie and asking me what I thought, and I tell them it was one of the dumbest movies I'd ever seen.
The Netflix show captures the competitive spirit between the stringers, but it's a realistic human commercial competitive spirit. They compete with each other, but at the same time they're all good friends with each other and respect each other.
Nightcrawler just goes way overboard with that and a lot of other things. Bill Paxton making fun of Gyllenhaal for missing the money shot, or yelling at his assistant, "COME ON, GET THE OTHER ANGLE, WHAT THE F*** AM I PAYIN' YOU FOR???" Gyllenhaal going into the house where a mass shooting just took place and shooting all the carnage before the cops got there, and then selling it to a TV station, and the station airs it? Or how about insisting that he get paid, what was it, $15,000 for some raw spot news footage? Or insisting that in exchange for him continuing to do business with the TV station, the executive producer (Rene Russo) be his girlfriend. And instead of just telling him to #*** off, she actually has a dilemma about that, as if her news product's overall ratings totally hinge on having his stringer footage. Give me a BREAK.
And the worst part of all this, is that people who don't work in TV news see Nightcrawler and think that's how ALL TV news people behave. Overall the main character played by Gyllenhaal is portrayed as a psychotic villain.
Just another news-media-bashing movie as far as I'm concerned.