For months now, Netflix and Paramount have been engaged in a fierce bidding war to take over Warner Bros, one of the oldest and most famous movie studios in the world. It could lead to the largest media acquisitions in recent history, uniting dozens of companies, channels, services and brands under a single conglomerate. The high-stakes business drama reached a head when Paramount surpassed Netflix’s $83 billion majority offer in what is essentially the makings of a hostile takeover: the whole shebang, for a cool $108 billion — $40 billion of that personally guaranteed by Larry Ellison — and its sixth offer in as little as three months.
Right now, Warner Bros. Discovery is busy urging its shareholders to reject this offer, which would swing the pendulum back to Netflix.
But for home audiences, moviegoers, and television junkies who aren’t lured by millions of dollars of stock options and golden parachutes, what does this all mean?
Here’s What A Warner Bros. Acquisiton Could Mean for Canadians
Warner Bros. Discovery is already a juggernaut of television, film, and print media — and any major merger would fold the world’s largest media companies into one massive, unwieldy umbrella. Want access to HBO’s greatest hits like Game of Thrones, Succession, or The Sopranos, or its most popular contemporary shows like Welcome to Derry or The Chair Company? How about the Batman and Superman franchises, creations of DC Comics and DC Studios? The Harry Potter franchise shows no signs of fading popularity two decades after the first book debuted: new audiobook remasters, a series on HBO starring John Lithgow, and even a cozily themed baking competition are set to debut within the next two years.
In Canada, many of these hit shows — especially HBO’s catalog — are currently available on Crave. But the impact of the world’s most popular streamers cannot be understated: Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV are all wildly popular and accessible. Netflix was Canada’s first international market, launching as late as 2010. Now it is a seemingly unstoppable force, which just this year launched massive new hits like K-Pop Demon Hunters and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery — as well as the hotly-anticipated Stranger Things series finale and George Clooney’s latest film, Jay Kelly.
“Competition is a force for good for consumers, for actors, for production crews and more working on films. The only people who don’t benefit really are the studio heads.”Dr. Jacob Lee Hiler, Ohio University College of Business.
Experts fear that this rapid consolidation, on the level of tens of billions of dollars, will stifle competition and therefore innovation — closing off opportunities for independent filmmakers from reaching the means and literal channels of distribution. Already, directors like James Cameron have sounded the alarms on Netflix’s belief that theatrical films are dead.
Netflix would have access to a century’s worth of historic films and franchises. Already the world’s largest streaming service and content producer, it could fluctuate the price of subscription packages and advertising tiers on a whim. With access to CBS News, its executives could reshape one of the latest news sources to suit the chaos of the Trump administration — we’ve already seen major businesses kowtow to Trump’s propagandist whims.
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As it stands, the Paramount deals have thrown in a wrench into the proceedings. Paramount has not only been a rival studio to Warner Bros. for most of the 20th and 21st centuries, but it’s gotten aggressive in the streaming market, launching Paramount Plus (first CBS All-Access) in 2014. Since then, the theoretical border wall between streaming and studio has been blown up: the old model between production and distribution is one and the same.
“You take a competitive studio that would force Netflix to innovate and suddenly Netflix owns it,” says Ohio University College of Business expert Jacob Hiler. “Competition is a force for good for consumers, for actors, for production crews and more working on films. The only people who don’t benefit really are the studio heads.”
Hiler cites United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), legislation which forced major studios to divest from the theatre chains that they owned, thereby preventing a monopoly. Eight decades ago, the movie theatres were the only way to watch everything from newsreels to noirs; even with the advent of television, home video, Blockbuster (which, again, scoffed at Netflix in the late 1990s), and streaming in general.
Yet by today’s standards, we’re presented with the illusion of choice: when everything you’ve watched and every piece of beloved media comes from one juggernaut of a source, what’s left for the consumer to do if they’re not satisfied with the service?
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