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It’s not unusual for a corporate merger to take months and months to actually finalize, but even by those standards, the bidding for ownership of Warner Bros Discovery has been drawn out. Netflix made a deal to buy the Warner Bros side of the company – its studio and streaming businesses – late last year, but Paramount Skydance has been undeterred, aggressively pursuing what it claims to be a better offer for the entire WBD operation. After several failed attempts at a hostile takeover, WBD is considering a final Paramount offer, to which Netflix will have the opportunity to counter. What we have is what learned cinema scholars might refer to as an Alien v Predator situation, in honor of Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox: whoever wins, we lose.
That is to say that for cinema devotees, casual viewers and people working in the film industry, the ideal outcome would be for Warner Bros to continue as its own entity: an entertainment company making movies and TV series. But that’s clearly not going to happen – nor are any number of relatively superior options floated last year, like the idea of Apple, who worked with the studio on the global smash and Best Picture nominee F1, buying Warner instead. They’re still a massive corporation, but they’ve shown a willingness to spend on major (and theatrically released!) projects like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and have such a thriving business in other areas that they could afford to run Warner as a real studio, trying to continue the company’s recent hot streak.
That’s a pipe dream now, though. So which alien and/or predator would be the better outcome for people who actually like movies?
None other than James Cameron appeared to speak up for the latter when he denigrated a potential Netflix deal as “disastrous” to the film industry in a letter to Senator Mike Lee. Cameron noted, as others have, that Netflix’s business model doesn’t just avoid the traditional theatrical pipeline – it seems downright hostile toward it. (Only some of the company’s films are released theatrically, typically outside the major chains and for a limited time; primarily this is done for awards qualification purposes and/or to appease big-name film-makers.) Netflix seems to regard movie theaters as competition, not a complement to their future of home video.
This sometimes flies in the face of potential profit. No matter how many times a movie has appeared to do particularly well on streaming because it was a theatrical release first, Netflix has steadfastly refused to make deals that would get their movies in normal wide release before streaming. Perversely, they seem far more excited to work out ways for work that is already on Netflix, like KPop Demon Hunters or the series finale of Stranger Things, to make special appearances in national theater chains, rather than just allow a Guillermo del Toro movie to actually play on a few thousand screens for a couple of months before hitting the streamer. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has had plenty of opportunities to support a theatrical market before; why would buying Warner Bros convince him to start?
Paramount Skydance, on the other hand, is very much a traditional studio. Their streaming service has never fully taken off, which means it’s also never fully taken over. Paramount released nine movies in theaters last year, including a sci-fi remake (The Running Man), an old-fashioned character-based dramedy (Roofman), a romantic drama (Regretting You), a mega-budget Mission: Impossible sequel, and a couple of kids’ cartoons. Their 2026 schedule is thinner in variety – lots of sequels and horror – but it’s greater in number, with nearly a dozen titles. Unlike 20th Century Fox, whose output now largely consists of direct-to-Hulu movies for its parent company Disney, Warner Bros would probably not become a de facto streaming label for its new owners. Its movies would continue to come out in theaters.
The question is, how many of those movies would there be? Warner put out 11 movies in US theaters in 2025, and after a rough start, most of them turned out to be hits. They have 15 scheduled for 2026 (including the current hit Wuthering Heights). Would a single merged studio really be willing to put out 20 to 30 movies in theaters every year?
Paramount claims that’s more or less the plan. It seems more realistic, though, to expect something closer to Paramount release schedules of years past, where they might manage as many as 15 or 16 titles in a big year, using the Warner Bros pipeline to supplement, rather than fully double, their output. That, in turn, raises questions of what those select Warner Bros movies would look like. Warner has plenty of big franchises on offer, just as Fox did for Disney. It’s easy enough to picture the WB shield turning into a de facto label for DC superhero movies, Conjuring-verse sequels, and whatever Harry Potter garbage could be squeezed from that IP – just as 20th Century Studios’ theatrical releases are primarily Avatar, Planet of the Apes, or – yes, Alien and/or Predator movies.
Think about it: do Warner movies like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, or Maggie Gyllenhaal’s upcoming feminist horror musical The Bride! seem like the kind of risks that Paramount’s David Ellison would be willing to entertain amid his initiative to make “patriotic, flag-waving” movies like a Call of Duty adaptation? Ellison seems willing to greenlight Rush Hour 4 as a favor to Brett Ratner and an appeasement to Donald Trump – so one of his big studio-revitalizing plans is to make a belated third sequel directed by a man accused of sexual misconduct at the behest of a fascist. Ellison definitely wants to put movies in theaters, but it’s hard to picture him actively courting good ones. Netflix, on the other hand, has maintained relationships with film-makers like Guillermo del Toro, David Fincher, and Noah Baumbach and acquired smaller-scale titles like Train Dreams. The company also churns out a lot of DTV-grade junk, but their actual upper-end output seems relatively compatible with the storied Warner Bros legacy, and Sarandos has been increasingly insistent that he plans to keep Warner Bros operationally intact, not turn it into a Netflix tile.
None of this makes Netflix acquiring Warner Bros a reason to cheer. All of these mergers and acquisitions are designed to stifle competition and encourage corporate dominance in a space that does demonstrably better with greater variety available to consumers. The public rapaciousness of Paramount is exactly why those consumers, and Warner Bros brass, should be suspicious of Ellison and his nepo-baby billions. Netflix has made a plausible case that it wants to make movies. Paramount mostly wants its Batman action figures.
English (US) ·