Netflix has put in the highest bid for Warner Bros Discovery, and is expected to buy the company, merging HBO Max with Netflix, for one thing.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/05/media/netflix-deal-warner-bros
Well, that would be enough more content that i might pay for the no-ad version. Although i wonder how much they’ll jack up the prices.
“Man, David Zaslav is a terrible CEO. He’s destroying WB. I wish someone else would take over.”
(monkey’s paw curls)
I am curious to see how much money Zaslav ends up with. My guess is that this was his goal all along, given the absolute stupid moves he made while in charge.
The tradeoff is that Ted Sarandos is not a blithering moron like Zaslav, but at the same time Sarandos is probably objectively more evil.
I’ve been hoping there would be some consolidation in streaming platforms.
This is going to be a big negative for people who like to watch movies at movie theaters as the Warner, etc movies won’t be available there [after current contracts end].
I was thinking that too, but as an avid moviegoer myself, I’ve noticed movie theater crowds have been shrinking steadily since COVID ended, even for blockbusters. I hate to admit it, but the heyday of going to the movies in theaters is long gone. Why bother going out when you can stay home and enjoy a similar experience in your living room, and you can pause it whenever you want or need to? Sure, you may have to wait a few months before it’s available online, and you still may have to pay a few bucks to watch it, but for many (most?) people, the convenience of watching at home beats the experience of seeing it on the big screen. As someone who ran a film festival so people could experience movies in a theater they had only seen on TV (think Jaws and Casablanca), I learned that most people are either too lazy to go out or don’t care as much as I do.
This is not a done deal, Netflix has the top offer currently, but the other players are still around and the government might not allow this. All of this is in the quoted article and I’ve been reading it elsewhere as well.
Paramount was considering also buying CNN which Discovery wants to get rid of. They also were the leading buyer just a week ago or so.
What makes Sarandos evil? I’ve not heard this before. We’re very please the second largest Netflix studio in under construction in my county on what use to be Fort Monmouth.
You know, as much as people say “I hate having multiple subscriptions, I wish I could have one big service that has everything”**, I think that’s a bad idea for the industry. Giving one entity that much control over entertainment is dangerous. They’ll have a huge say in what can get made, what’s available or not available to view, how much they can demand to charge, etc. Netflix has been a pretty reasonable player for a media company up until this point, so this is better than, if, say, Paramount were to have bought WB, but I don’t think this will end up being good for consumers in the long term.
** what’s funny to me is that they often say "I have to pay all these subscriptions, we’re basically back to cable, which makes no sense since having fewer companies control everything is much more “we’re back to cable” than having a more fragmented market that you can subscribe to piecemeal.
Yeah, things were getting pretty Balkanized for awhile there, with every media company deciding they needed their own streaming platform. Now things do seem to be consolidating, like the Disney+ / Hulu merger. I do wonder if this means access to both Netflix and HBO Max content together with only one streaming cost. Even if Netflix bumps up their prices a little, it may be worth it for the extra content. We had cancelled our HBO Max subscription months ago and were thinking of renewing it before I heard the merger news.
If this goes through I think it’s pretty good news, because a major alternative buyer and former front-runner is Paramount, which is run by lunatic Trumpist David Ellison. This might put programs like Last Week with John Oliver and anything else perceived as anti-Trump in jeopardy.
I’m not quite following this. Are you saying that Netflix/Warners wouldn’t put new movies into theatres (a la K-Pop Demon Hunters)? Or are you worried about not being able to see old movies re-released into theatres?
Oh goodie more media consolidation. Less choice, higher prices.
I don’t know about that. They say Warners films will still be released theatrically, just with a shorter window between theater and streaming. Warner Bros have had some of the highest grossing films of 2025, and were the first studio in 2025 to surpass $4 billion. That’s a huge revenue stream to lose for both theaters and Netflix if they don’t come to an agreement.
Consider the Netflix movie Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
As a Netflix movie it has a limited release on about 600 mostly indie screens with a 16 day exclusivity window and might have a total worldwide theater gross of less than $10 million in this short run.
Suppose it had been released as a Warner movie. It would be on 4,000 or so screens with probably a 45 day exclusivity window and might have a total worldwide theater gross of $250 million or so.
I expect in the future that what are currently Warner movies will have this same very limited theatrical distribution. Netflix knows it could could make a lot of money with its movies with a standard theatrical release–but has calculated it can make more money just streaming. For example when a big blockbuster is released they pick up a significant number of new subscribers and many of these subscribers stick for the long term.
This is some “inside entertainment baseball” type stuff, but — Sarandos is at the front edge of the wave that regards all media as interchangeable content. There’s no such thing as art. It doesn’t matter what you’re watching, as long as you’re watching. Netflix has consciously constructed a content extrusion pipeline with an in-house pool of cinematographers, editors, and other craftspeople who work from the same playbook. That’s why nearly all the Netflix-produced stuff looks exactly the same — it’s all flatly-lit, indifferently-graded, digital-sheen sludge, because this is what’s most compatible with their brutal video-compression algorithm. A small handful of directors have the juice to make their movies their own way (check out Fincher’s Killer or Bay’s 6 Underground, for example), but most filmmakers have no choice but to accept the creative limitations. How else do you explain that they spent two hundred million dollars on Red Notice and it still looks like refried dogshit from beginning to end?
Now, it’s true, a lot of people in the mainstream audience don’t think or care about visual media as an art form. They use the word “content” unironically. It doesn’t matter to them whether they’re clicking play on Killers of the Flower Moon or Sugar Rush Season Two or the latest installment of Mr. Beast — it’s all just stimulation to pour into their eyeholes. They don’t care what something looks like, how it’s filmed or edited, as long as the flow of flashing colors into the media trough remains steady. For people like this, Sarandos and the Netflix machine constitute a perfectly acceptable supplier of empty visual calories.
But if you know anything about movies and television — if you understand production and know why everything Looks Like That now — if you’re not just disappointed but actively offended by the desaturated digital vomit that is the so-called cinematography in the Wicked movies — if you have the background not simply to recognize, for example, that Andor is next-level excellent while Ahsoka is rancid nonsense, but to understand and explain exactly how and why that happened, in the context of the last forty years of evolving industry practices — then you know that our established storytelling forms are under active attack from those at the top, and Ted Sarandos is one of the standard-bearers, an insidious but avowed enemy of art.
And imagining what he will do if he gets control of this venerable movie studio’s creative pipeline — however compromised it might have become under Zaslav’s incompetent stewardship, and Tsujihara before him — makes me nauseous.
To be fair, the prospect of Paramount winning the bidding war, given the Ellisons’ close association with Trump, is probably worse. If the choice is limited to these two options, then ownership of WB by Netflix is the marginally less awful outcome. But that doesn’t make it a good thing.
I take some small amount of comfort in the fact that buying or merging with Warner Bros. has doomed almost every company that’s done it, from Time, to Turner, to AOL, to AT&T, and now Discovery.
As a general rule, I dislike “mergers & acquisitions” because they reduce competition, which isl bad for consumers.
For example, in the Car Rental Industry, 3 “parent companies” control over 90% of the business.
Note that CNN, TNT, Discovery, Food Network and the other cable channels currently owned by Warner Bros Discovery aren’t included but instead will be part of a separate company. From what I’ve read, many in Hollywood are unhappy because they see that Netflix gives films only a small window of a theatrical release. (Frankenstein, for example, was only playing in arthouse cinemas in my area, so I waited for it to be available on Netflix and then temporarily signed up again.) Also, a piece I read on Variety called this the end of premium cable. Previously, Showtime was also premium cable with shows that competed with HBO but now they’re not producing premium cable shows and neither are AMC or FX.
To be honest, I miss the glory days of HBO when it spent lavishly on prestige shows like Rome or Game of Thrones. I was kind of hoping that Paramount Global would win Warner Bros Discovery because I thought with Larry and David Ellison’s very deep pockets, those days could return. (And also, with good management, the DC Studios film could have the kind of ongoing success that Marvel Studios has had for the past decade or so.)