Does the Warner Bros. Discovery deal mean that Netflix will finally win Best Picture at the Oscars?
That’s the obvious question in the awards arena now that Netflix and Warner Bros. have announced that the streaming giant is in exclusive deal talks to acquire the venerable Hollywood studio. After seven years of landing lots of Oscar nominations but never winning the big one, Netflix is working to take over the studio that released the clear favorite in this year’s race, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.”
“Somebody asked me, ‘Do you think they’re buying Warners so that they can win an Oscar?’” said one veteran campaign strategist on Friday, laughing.
On one level, the question is clearly a joke; the chances that the deal would be completed soon enough for Netflix to claim “One Battle” as their own before the March 15 ceremony are essentially nonexistent.
And on another level, it’s almost irrelevant. “How’s this going to affect awards?” said the strategist when the question was put to them. “Forget about that. What about how it’s going to affect this whole industry?”
Still, awards are a significant part of the industry, and questions will inevitably surround the idea of the most aggressive and well-funded player in the awards space taking over the historic studio favored to soon add a 10th Best Picture Oscar in a lineage that goes back to “The Life of Emile Zola” in 1937 and “Casablanca” in 1943.
The Netflix-WBD deal conjures up the idea of a awards-generating machine cranking out kudos-grabbing flicks year after year. That’s the stuff of nightmares for rivals, but is it a legitimate concern?
When you view the acquisition through the lens of Netflix’s Oscar history, the focus sharpens. The streamer has had at least one film nominated for Best Picture every year since 2018, and several of those have been considered serious candidates to win. But “Roma” lost to “Green Book” in 2019, “The Power of the Dog” lost to “CODA” in 2022 and “Emilia Pérez” lost to “Anora” in 2025.
Meanwhile, other Netflix nominees like “The Irishman,” “Mank,” “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and “Maestro” had heat at times but faded. In 2023, Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” won four Oscars, the most of any film from the platform, but A24’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” swept the biggest categories.
The overall record for Netflix’s 10 Best Picture nominees, which also include “Marriage Story” and “Don’t Look Up”: 83 nominations but only 13 wins, the biggest of those being the Best Director nods for Alfonso Cuarón and Jane Campion.
But it’s not as if Warner Bros. has done any better in that time. The studio had eight Best Picture nominees in the past seven years to Netflix’s 10, but none of them have been real favorites to take home the top prize. WB hasn’t won Best Picture since “Argo” in 2013, and its only other wins in this century were “The Departed” in 2006 and “Million Dollar Baby” in 2004.
This year, though, “One Battle After Another” has won one award after another in the early going, and Warners’ “Sinners” has been high on every list as well. While Netflix might well end up with three Best Picture nominees in “Frankenstein,” “Jay Kelly,” and “Train Dreams,” those three films could still end their awards runs by watching a WB movie take the final Oscar.
Obviously, that’s no reason to spend $82.7 billion on the studio. Just as obviously, spending big doesn’t guarantee anything with voters, who in the Netflix era have given the Best Picture award to films from Universal twice, Neon twice, and Searchlight, Apple and A24 once each.
The Oscars don’t need the major studios to supply them with Best Picture nominees anymore; the smaller indies, the studio indie branches like Focus and Searchlight and the eager streamers can do that on their own. Still, when you look at the big hits that help draw viewers to the Academy Awards—“Oppenheimer,” “Barbie,” “Dune,” “Wicked,” “Black Panther” and their ilk—those, by and large, come from the big studios. The loss of a studio, if it turns out that’s what the deal means, would be distressing.
But we don’t know if that’s what the Netflix-WBD deal means. We don’t know if it’ll create an awards behemoth crushing everything in its path, or if it’ll give Neon and A24 a big new target to take down on their way to the winners’ circle. (On the TV side, though, Netflix + HBO Max is truly scary for everybody else.)
We just know that something very big might be in the works, that it’ll shake up a movie industry reeling from years of turmoil, and that the tremors will be felt by all the people who gather this time of year to hand out shiny statues.
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