Is it another blow to American democracy? Or at least to the movies?
For months, my inbox has been buzzing with speculation and agony over a Paramount Skydance bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Even after Netflix and Comcast stepped in with their bids, the assumption was that Paramount’s David Ellison was in pole position, since he reportedly had the backing of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Virtually every newsletter I subscribed to seemed to have takes. Economics writers lamented Trump’s crony-capitalist approach to regulation, while political writers fretted that Ellison’s growing empire would become the propaganda wing of the MAGA movement. Media mavens reveled in dealmaking intrigue, while business scribes talked strategy and finances. Entertainment pundits, meanwhile, brooded about all these things, plus what it meant for the movies and the creatives who make them.
“The WBD Deal Puts Hollywood, and Democracy, at Risk,” blared the headline of an op-ed posted Thursday and written by Jane Fonda for the Ankler, a leading Hollywood newsletter.
On Friday, the speculation finally resolved itself into a deal. WBD will split into two pieces, and Netflix will buy the piece that contains the studio and the HBO Max streaming business, while the cable assets are left to … who? Paramount, meanwhile, could make a last-minute hostile takeover bid for WBD. But there’s plenty to chew on in the deal we have now.
WBD shareholders should be ecstatic: As recently as September, you could have bought shares in the whole company for less than half what Netflix is now paying to buy just a piece of it. Those worried about crony capitalism can also breathe a sigh of relief (at least until the Federal Trade Commission attempts to block the deal or extracts weird concessions in exchange for green-lighting it — what would you say to a $240 million Trump biopic?).
Netflix shareholders might not be so happy, since this is the latest in a long line of megamergers for Warners, none of which worked out, which is why it’s on the auction block again. But Netflix stock is still worth roughly three times what it was at the beginning of the pandemic; growth is stellar, and profit margins are healthy. Netflix shareholders will be fine.
On the other hand, the people who make feature films, or like to watch them, should be worried. As the final bids came in, the Ankler’s Richard Rushfield called this “the most destructive development to Hollywood in the history of this column.” Fundamentally, Netflix is in the streaming business, not the theater business, and while Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has promisedthat he’ll keep putting Warner Bros. films into theaters, he won’t promise they’ll be there very long.
“Our primary goal is to bring first-run movies to our members, because that’s what they’re looking for,” he said at a Friday press conference. Great news if you’d rather watch the latest hot release on the couch; bad news if you like the theater experience, because shortening release windows will probably cannibalize ticket sales to the point of extinction. Eventually, that probably means the end of the feature film as a major art form, because like other art forms, it was a product of certain technological realities.
The short story used to be a viable commercial and artistic proposition, until television killed off the pulp magazines. By the 1980s, short stories were more of a loss leader for novel writers (actual or aspiring). Today, the form is mostly the province of tiny literary magazines, and its author usually survives on grants, gigs teaching creative writing and pedestrian day jobs.
I’m afraid I expect the feature film to suffer a similar fate, because everything about the medium is optimized for theaters: its visual language, its lavish production budgets and even its length (long enough to be worth leaving the house for, not so long that your butt goes numb). In the future, storytelling will be optimized for streaming into our living rooms — unless, of course, it’s optimized for YouTube and TikTok, or some other technological medium I can’t yet imagine.
I understand Hollywood’s sadness and trepidation and anger about losing such a culturally central art form. I, too, feel that something will be irretrievably lost. But that denouement is coming even if antitrust regulators block the deal — heck, even if Congress outlaws movie streaming. Inflation-adjusted domestic box office revenue is down 40 percent since 2019, and the alternative to our new mega-streamer isn’t that people go back to the theaters. It’s that they turn to whatever else is on their small screens: video games, YouTube, TikTok.
At least Netflix is in the business of paying creators to do scripted storytelling, even if it’s not the kind of storytelling they’d most like to be doing, or as lucrative as it used to be. Though streaming lacks some of the grandeur of film, it enables some things that were hard or impossible in feature films or on network television: longer story arcs, niche genres and deeper character studies. That may feel like poor compensation to those who would rather watch (or make) a movie. But at least visual storytelling will survive, even if the feature film doesn’t.
The post The last act of the feature film appeared first on Washington Post.
