Donald Trump has threatened to personally intervene in Netflix’s $82 billion megadeal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
On Friday, Netflix agreed to pay $82.7 billion for Warner Bros., an offer that beat out bids by both Paramount and Comcast; however, the mammoth deal still needs to be approved by regulators.
During a red carpet appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington D.C., on Sunday, Trump confirmed he had met with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos at the White House last week ahead of the winning bid.
“That’s gotta go through a process, and we’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “Netflix is a great company, they’ve done a phenomenal job. Ted is a fantastic man, I have a lot of respect for him… but it’s a lot of market share, so we’ll have to see what happens.”
The Netflix deal will give the company, which began as a DVD rental business, the Warner Bros. library and its intellectual property, which includes DC Studios comic creations, the Harry Potter franchise, HBO dramas including Game of Thrones, and over 100 years of films from the studio.
However, there has been backlash about how much market share the deal will give Netflix and what it will mean for the future of cinemas.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who heads the antitrust subcommittee, said that the deal “should send alarm to antitrust enforcers around the world.”
Lee posted on X, “This potential transaction, if it were to materialize, would raise serious competition questions—perhaps more so than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade… increasing Netflix’s dominance this way would mean the end of the Golden Age of streaming for content creators and consumers.”
Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren called the deal “an anti-monopoly nightmare.”
“A Netflix-Warner Bros. would create one massive media giant with control of close to half of the streaming market — threatening to force Americans into higher subscription prices and fewer choices over what and how they watch, while putting American workers at risk,” Warren said in a statement.
“Under Donald Trump, the antitrust review process has also become a cesspool of political favoritism and corruption,” she added. “The Justice Department must enforce our nation’s anti-monopoly laws fairly and transparently — not use the Warner Bros. deal review to invite influence-peddling and bribery.”
On Sunday, Trump was directly asked if Netflix “should be allowed” to buy Warner.
“Well, that’s the question,” Trump said, before indicating he would be personally involved in the negotiations over the deal’s approval.
“They have a very big market share, and when they have Warner Bros., you know, that share goes up a lot. So I don’t know. That’s going to be for some economists to tell… And I’ll be involved in that decision too, but they have a very big market share.”
Bloomberg first reported Sarandos spent an hour with Trump at the White House, where Trump said Warner Bros. should sell to the highest bidder.
The Netflix boss said the company was not an all-powerful monopoly and had survived shedding subscribers in the past few years. The publication reported Sarandos left the meeting believing he would not face immediate opposition from the White House.
On Sunday, Trump was asked if Sarandos had made “any guarantees” during their meeting about the merger if it was approved by regulators.
“No, no, not at all,” Trump insisted. “He came up. He was in the Oval Office last week. I have a lot of respect for him.”
Trump said Sarandos had “done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies and other things,” before comparing him to Louis B. Meyer, who co-founded the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in 1924.
“I mean, he had a company that was very troubled seven or eight years ago and he took it over and he really done a legendary job,” Trump said of Sarandos.
The president then circled back to the scope of the deal, admitting, “It is a big market share. There’s no question about it. It could be a problem.”
During a Friday conference call with Wall Street analysts, Sarandos said Netflix’s reputation had previously been for building content, not buying it.
“We already have incredible shows and movies and a great business model, and it’s working for talent, it’s working for consumers, and it’s working for shareholders,” he said. “But this is a rare opportunity and it’s going to help us achieve our mission to entertain the world and to bring people together through great stories.”
However, Cinema United, the largest exhibition trade organization in the world, spoke up for theatre owners. “The proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. by Netflix poses an unprecedented threat to the global exhibition business,” said its president and CEO, Michael O’Leary. The organisation said in a statement 25 percent of the annual domestic box office would be at risk if Warner Bros. movies go direct to streaming.
Former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar said he could not think of “a more effective way to reduce competition in Hollywood than selling WBD to Netflix.”
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