The three-way bidding war that erupted after Warner Bros. Discovery formally announced (back in October) that it was putting the ol’ water tower up for sale has apparently concluded, Deadline reports, and it did so with a sound that marketing professionals continue to insist, to our ever-deepening irritation, has to be written out as “Tudum!” Yes, Netflix—the DVD envelope people, with the BoJack Horsemans and the movies where The Rock seems to be constantly glaring at people in formal wear—is apparently now in position to buy at least part of one of Hollywood’s oldest studios. (Also all the Discovery Channel stuff, but that doesn’t carry quite the same smack of a legacy being fed to the Silicon Valley heathens, yeah?)
Let’s start by noting that “winning the bidding war” here means there are still about a million caveats to this whole thing before it can become a done deal. Including a), the fact that Netflix hasn’t actually bought anything as of yet, and has basically just secured for itself a chance to enter into specific one-on-one negotiations with WBD for a future purchase. And b), it only really wants the company’s studios and HBO Max, and won’t be buying, say, all of Warner Bros.’ TV networks. And c), any deal the two companies make will then have to seek governmental authorization, running straight into the maw of White House-controlled regulators who’ve been very comfortable about forcing big media corporations to suck their rings in order to get deals like this through. Still, though: This is step one of all that, including reports that Netflix has agreed to give Warner Bros. a hefty $5 billion “breakup fee” if the deal fails to close.
News that this little coup was coming has pissed off a pretty wide coalition of people today, starting with David Ellison, owner of Paramount, who’s been claiming very loudly in the trades that Warner Bros. has been trying to rig the sale in Netflix’s favor from the start. Meanwhile, Variety reported several hours ago—before official word of the bidding war finishing was getting passed around—that a group of anonymous “concerned feature film producers” had sent a letter to basically any Congressperson they thought might listen, complaining that Netflix buying the studio would “effectively hold a noose around the theatrical marketplace.” There’s no word of exactly who signed the letter, on account of the definition of the word “anonymous.” But Variety does quote a source saying “a number of prominent filmmakers” were among its signatories; these folks are calling for “the highest level of antitrust scrutiny” on the deal, which, they allege, could specifically do massive harm to theaters by cutting the window between when Warner Bros. movies appear in theaters and when they arrive on streaming to as little as two weeks. (Netflix leadership has done itself no especially big favors on this score, by the way, with its only-begrudging willingness to put films onto the big screen as a token sop to ornery filmmakers, while Ted Sarandos goes around calling the whole concept of going to the movies “outdated.”)
It’s easy, amidst all these mergers, acquisitions, movements of giant piles of money and IP, to reduce the whole massive business down to so much easily-dismissed Succession-esque boardroom bullshit. But Netflix ponying up to buy one of the major studios feels big—not just as a symbol of the old guard giving way to the new, but because one of the major arms of American cinema might wind up in the hands of a company that’s unabashedly cinema-agnostic. It’s a major shift in the dynamic, no matter how it all ends up playing out, and those always seem to shake a whole lot of very unsettling elements loose in the process.
