For months, Hollywood has fretted about the possible acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, home to one of the industry’s most storied studios. The likeliest buyer seemed to be one of its chief rivals, Paramount, a legacy movie company suddenly flush with cash and power under its new owner, David Ellison. The son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison seemingly has his eyes set on controlling as much of American filmmaking as possible, and was rumored to be plotting a big maneuver to merge the two studios; Warner Bros. eventually opened up a bidding war in October, after Ellison made multiple takeover offers. Paramount appeared set to secure a victory, reportedly with the tacit approval of the Trump White House, until the surprising news broke last Friday: Netflix had won the auction. Suddenly, a new kind of apocalypse was on the horizon for an industry facing numerous issues already.
A potential merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. had sparked widespread concerns—primarily because consolidation on this level is often bad for market competition. Left-wing pundits also expressed anxiety about the conservative-leaning Ellison gaining control of Warner Bros.’ TV properties, namely CNN, which would give him immense heft in the cable-news space. (Paramount already operates CBS, which has experienced politically fraught turnover in recent months.) But the notion of Netflix—a colossal streaming company that is actively hostile to theatrical exhibition—owning such a venerable Hollywood studio has struck some critics as a grander existential threat. Since announcing the deal, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has put out statements trying to assuage any panic. “I think it’s important to note that all we are going to do with this is staying deeply committed to releasing those movies exactly the way they’ve released the movies today,” he said at a conference on Monday. He went on to note that, once it assumes responsibility of Warner Bros., Netflix will commit to being in the theatrical business.
The devil, however, will be in the details. Sarandos has never been in favor of the traditional moviegoing experience that Warner Bros., under its present management, still respects: screening films exclusively in theaters for several weeks before allowing them onto any streaming platform. Sarandos considers those windows not consumer-friendly, but they’re essentially the only way that theatrical chains can stay afloat; as the trade group Cinema United put it in a statement following the news of Netflix’s successful bid, “The proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. by Netflix poses an unprecedented threat to the global exhibition business.”
[Read: ‘Netflix thinks exactly like an old movie studio’]
The fate of Warner Bros. has been hanging in the balance for a long time. The company is laden with debt, swirled up with cable-TV businesses that are no longer the cash cows they once were, and has passed through many corporate hands over the past three decades. Since saddling up with its most recent co-owner, Discovery, Warner Bros. has cut costs, canceled fully finished films as a tax write-off, and embarked on a wild—and ultimately short-lived—rebranding of its successful streaming service, HBO Max.
Despite all of this chaos and red ink, Warner Bros. has just wrapped up an outstanding year creatively, the likes of which any contemporary studio could barely dream of. It had four smash box-office hits, in A Minecraft Movie, Superman, The Conjuring: Last Rites, and Final Destination: Bloodlines. But it also put out two of the best-regarded original films of the year, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another; both are likely to be major Oscar contenders and demonstrated that the public’s appetite for innovative, grown-up moviemaking has not vanished.
That recent success is what makes this acquisition high stakes. When Disney took over 21st Century Fox in 2019, for example, the latter had been floundering for years, struggling to keep up with the industry’s shift toward franchises and existing properties. In this case, Paramount or Netflix would be subsuming a studio that’s been successful at putting butts in cinema seats—not that getting audiences into the cinemas has been a priority for Netflix, anyway. It’s also easy to read nefarious purposes into the top bidders’ actions: Ellison trying to gain as much territory as possible in a shrinking media landscape, Netflix trying to tilt the industry even more toward at-home experiences by gaining control over one of its biggest competitors.
[Read: Hollywood makes way for the Disney-Fox behemoth]
But it’s just as easy to imagine none of these merger plans happening. Though Sarandos reportedly met with the White House about the acquisition before Netflix put in its offer, President Donald Trump has commented that the deal “could be a problem” because of the market share the streamer would attain. Paramount, having been spurned at the bidding stage, has launched an all-cash, aggressive takeover as its next move, going directly to shareholders in the hopes of earning their approval. Part of Ellison’s pitch is further scaremongering on the dangers posed by Netflix to, among other things, moviegoing.
No matter who comes out on top, the possibilities probably signal more trouble ahead for filmmaking. Unless another major studio is willing to leap ahead and pump out more movies in response to this consolidation—be it Apple, which has half-heartedly mounted a few theatrical campaigns in recent years, or the indie distributor A24, which has scaled up its spending of late—the public could get fewer options in cinemas going forward. As these competing deals get untangled, Warner Bros.’ output seems likely to slow down, its corporate future uncertain and its leadership less sure of what movies it can afford to green-light. Hollywood has overcome many roadblocks of late, between the coronavirus pandemic and the crippling nature of 2023’s acting and writing strikes. But corporate greed may end up doing the most damage of all.
The post The Apocalyptic Potential of the Netflix–Warner Bros. Deal appeared first on The Atlantic.
