After a protracted bidding war, it has been revealed that Netflix will purchase Warner Bros., a 100-year-old movie studio responsible for a huge number of movie classics, for $82.7 billion. That means that Netflix will own the rights to the DC Comics movies, the Harry Potter series, the Game of Thrones franchise, HBO, and much more.
I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but this is a direct attack on movie fans and threatens to grind our happiness into chalky acrid dust.
Netflix hates movie theaters and always has
The idea of making movies for movie theaters is “outdated,” says Netflix CEO
Cinema United, a trade organization of movie theater owners, isn’t happy about this either: “The proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. by Netflix poses an unprecedented threat to the global exhibition business,” they said in a statement, per Deadline. Why are they so nervous?
Simply put, Netflix is known to be dead-set against showing movies in movie theaters. All you need to do is look at what CEO Ted Sarandos has said about the theatrical experience to understand why theater owners would be on edge. Speaking at the Time100 Summit this past April, Sarandos called the idea of making movies with theatrical audiences in mind “an outdated concept,” per Variety. “If you’re fortunate to live enough in Manhattan, and you can walk to a multiplex and see a movie, that’s fantastic. Most of the country cannot.”
To me, this reads like nonsense word salad. Ted, do you think people like watching movies in movie theaters because they’re easy to walk to? People have cars, Ted. You sound ridiculous, Ted.
The simplest explanation is probably the correct one: Ted Sarandos doesn’t like releasing movies in movie theaters because it means people aren’t watching them on Netflix, and he thinks that cuts into his profit margins. Warner Bros., on the other hand, had a spectacular year at the box office, with blockbusters like Superman and A Minecraft Movie making bank alongside sleeper hits like Sinners and Weapons; even an artsy epic like One Battle After Another made a splash in theaters. Would these movies have had the same impact if they’d been unceremoniously dumped on Netflix alongside the Meghan Markle Christmas special and the new season of Emily in Paris? Probably not.
Netflix says it will still release Warner Bros. movies in theaters
But it’s already vowing to chip away at the theatrical experience
To be fair, after the purchase was announced, Sarandos did say that he would still release Warner Bros. movies in theaters…kind of. “I’d say that right now you should count on everything that has planned on going to the theaters through Warner Bros. will continue to go to the theaters through Warner Bros.,” he allowed.
That said, Sarandos lodged his objection to “long, exclusive windows, which we don’t really think are that consumer friendly.” He used that language a couple of times, like here: “I think over time the windows will evolve to be much more consumer friendly … to meet the audience where they are.”
So basically, he’s saying that Netflix will still release Warner Bros. movies in theaters, but not for as long. The idea that it isn’t “consumer-friendly” to allow movies to play in theaters for a while before they land on streaming sounds like more nonsense to me. How is it “consumer-friendly” to give consumers fewer choices as to how, where, and when they want to watch movies? Again, it’s not hard to read between the lines here: to Sarandos, “consumer-friendly” means friendly to consumers who want to watch movies on Netflix at home, and everyone else can kick rocks.
It’s true that Netflix does release some of its movies in theaters, but often only for brief periods in a limited number of theaters, just enough to qualify for Oscar contention. That’s what recently happened with Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man. And sooner or later, I expect that’s what will happen with the movies that Warner Bros. makes, from the next Superman film to the next would-be horror sleeper hit to whatever auteur directors like Paul Thomas Anderson come up with; they’ll all be dumped on Netflix alongside everything else, without a robust theatrical run to create buzz. That doesn’t mean they’ll be bad, but something will definitely be lost. And with fewer films running in theaters for less time, theater owners and workers may be put out of business.
Can anything save us?
Antitrust, anyone?
Weeks ago, when it started to look like this sale could happen, the buzz was that the Trump administration was looking at the deal askance, concerned that Netflix buying Warner Bros. would make the streamer too powerful. Donald Trump favored a different potential buyer: Paramount-Skydance, run by David Ellison (son of Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle). It’s possible that the government could object to this sale on antitrust grounds. But will it? It’s hard to say right now.
Just in case someone influential is reading, there are other reasons to oppose this deal. In an era where shows and movies can be removed from streaming services without warning, having a robust collection of physical media is looking more and more appealing. Netflix very rarely releases anything on physical media, making building that collection harder than ever. Tell me again how this deal is “consumer-friendly?”
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The flattening of TV
We haven’t even talked about how this deal might affect TV. At the moment, Netflix says it intends to keep the HBO Max streaming service around as “a compelling, complementary offering for consumers,” although who knows if that will last?
Let’s say that HBO Max eventually gets folded into Netflix. While it would be nice not to have to pay for so many streaming services, there’s no guarantee that Netflix wouldn’t jack up the price; as one of the only games left in town, they could probably get away with it. Also, while I enjoy Netflix’s binge model as much as the next guy, I also like that there are some networks out there — including HBO — that release TV shows one episode at a time instead of dumping them all at once; sometimes I enjoy being able to think about an episode and talk about it with other people while we wait for the next one. But if this sale goes through, sooner or later, I expect everything Warner Bros. makes will adopt the Netflix model.
Basically, I like variety, and I like competition, and this deal threatens to stamp those things out. The sale is set to go through later in 2026, after Warner Bros. Discovery spins off several of its assets into a new company called Discovery Global. I’m hoping something blows it up between now and then.
