When it was announced that Netflix had agreed to buy Warner Bros., it was seen as a massive shift in the status quo of Hollywood. It was suggested that nothing would be the same again. A lot of Hollywood’s biggest names didn’t love the idea of the streamer taking over a legacy film studio. Now, of course, we know that the deal with Netflix isn’t happening. But if you thought the whole of Hollywood is happy with it, think again.
Following its initial hostile takeover attempt, Paramount upped its offer to buy Warner Bros., and Netflix decided not to compete, leaving the door open for two of the biggest film studios to become one. People may not have loved the idea of Netflix buying Warner Bros., but there are plenty of voices decrying this deal as well. Deadline spoke to an unnamed insider at a rival studio who said:
This is the most anticompetitive merger that violates the fundamental principles of the Sherman Antitrust Act. It’s purely a horizontal combination in an industry that’s already consolidated. The seventh and eighth biggest airlines, JetBlue and Spirit, weren’t allowed to merge, and now the No. 2 and No. 5 studio are being allowed. It’s a f--king joke.
As with the merger of Disney and Fox before it, the biggest concern is that the two studios combining shrinks the number of companies that are doing this work. It’s fully expected that the newly merged company will simply produce fewer films and TV shows than they did separately. Paramount has already confirmed plans to merge Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single streaming service.
Because the merger will take place between two nearly identical companies, the number of layoffs that will take place as a result of position redundancies (what Paramount refers to as “synergies") is expected to be high. The belief was that, because Netflix didn’t already have large-scale theatrical distribution or cable channels, more jobs would be saved.
Whatever ends up happening, it’s difficult to imagine that the result of a Paramount/Warner Bros. combined company won’t have ramifications that will be felt in Hollywood forever. An unnamed screenwriter/producer told Deadline that this merger will be on par with the addition of sound in films, saying:
Similar to how sound forced an upheaval in Hollywood and brought the end of the silent era, so will this Paramount-Warner Bros merger wreck the current motion picture industry as we know it.
While that may seem hyperbolic, it’s difficult to imagine that a major studio merger won’t have far-reaching consequences, for good or ill. That said, it will likely be several months before this merger is complete, and we may not actually see what the true impact of it all is for years to come.
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