John Landgraf has said that a Paramount Skydance takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, or another mega studio merger, is a matter of when, not if.
The FX chairman said it was “inevitable” that there would be seismic consolidation as legacy studios aim to compete with Netflix, Apple, and YouTube. His comments come as speculation about Paramount Skydance’s interest in WBD heats up.
Speaking at the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention on Thursday, Landgraf said: “We have an industry that, from a structural standpoint, requires some consolidation. We can’t have as many streaming services, certainly not global streaming services, and some of the great legacy majors in the United States don’t really have enough scale.
“I think that’s why you see — between Paramount, Universal, and Warner Brothers — a desire to consolidate at least two of those companies to try to create another distributor that has a scale globally.”
In conversation with Sister co-founder Jane Featherstone, he added: “I really honestly think it’s inevitable. If you look at the balance sheet for half of these companies independently, they really don’t have any way of scaling to 200, 250, 300 million global subscribers without some kind of consolidation.”
Landgraf acknowledged that it would be “really hard for the creative community, because essentially, there’ll be one less buyer” and “consolidation means greater efficiency.”
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