The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack .
The future of Warner Bros is again up in the air. Following yet another corporate restructuring – after having been partners or a subsidiary of Time, AOL, AT&T, and Discovery – the legendary movie studio was put up for sale last fall. The fight over who gets to own it has been the defining story in the entertainment industry ever since, one that sits at the nexus of all manner of sore subjects for Hollywood: the decline of traditional business models, the intrusion of political interests, the industry slowly drifting away from Los Angeles, the future of creative arts unions, fears of AI taking over….
For a century Warner Bros has been a pillar of the movie business, a name synonymous with cinematic excellence and old Hollywood glamour. With all of the recent disruption created by streaming, the decline of movie theaters, and the demise of physical media, Warner Bros offers a sense of permanence and history: it’s a real studio, with an incredible back catalog and assets like HBO, the DC comics universe, and the Harry Potter machine, to go along with established relationships with many stars and auteurs. So last October, when the studio’s board was cornered by unsolicited offers and a sagging stock price into opening its doors to bidders, a genuine spectacle was assured, and we got one. The streaming giant Netflix reached a deal in December for the studio and its assets; David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, itself a huge conglomeration of old Hollywood and new, went hostile and outbid Netflix, who declined to raise their offer and walked away. Shareholders blessed the Paramount offer, and the Justice Department ( Donald Trump ’s Justice Department) cleared the deal in June. Its looked like a done deal for a month, but this week resistance arrived from a different direction. This week twelve state attorney generals, including that of California, sued to block the merger. Now the whole thing is snarled in a courtroom. All the drama is worthy of, well, a Warner Bros movie.
For a century Warner Bros has been a pillar of the movie business.
There’s been a lot of crowing in the entertainment media about this latest development, and I get it: Paramount-Skydance Warner Bros really would be bad, in most of the specific ways people have listed. It would put a legacy studio and major news operation in the hands of Ellison, whose bid is underwritten by his father Larry, whose Oracle fortune make David’s ambitions possible. Larry is a major Trump donor, and the family’s coziness with the current administration has been offered – by the Ellisons themselves! – as a reason to expect an easy regulatory path. (Really not beating the allegations there, David.) The Skydance deal would fold one of the giants of the business into an even-larger entity in an already grotesquely consolidated industry . And the acquisition would bring the usual mega-merger aftermath: mass layoffs, shelved and buried projects, finished films written off for tax purposes and never released. (I haven’t forgotten you, Batgirl. ) To be clear, I absolutely recognize that this is all genuinely bad. I share the fears and concede to every particular.
But.
In the weeks when it looked like Netflix would be the buyer, a remarkable number of otherwise serious, sophisticated people in and around the business have been rooting for the mammoth streaming company, which boasts not only the largest subscriber base but also consistent profitability; most streamers still struggle to justify their basic financial reason for being, even now after years of price hikes. Because the Ellisons are perceived to be bad politically, creatively, and for labor, many were willing to overlook the abundant problems that a Netflix takeover would entail. And I think it’s unwise to understate the potential dangers of Option B just because it’s better than Option A. Legendary director James Cameron seems to agree that Netflix brings issues of its own; he supported Paramount’s bid and said flatly that a Netflix takeover “would be a disaster” for the studio’s creative future. But the ambient mood among writers, directors, and the people who cover them ran the opposite way: better the tech company than the Ellisons! Better the industry-devouring monster than a Trump loyalist. And now that the Paramount deal is tangled in litigation, you can see that wish reviving: maybe the states kill it, maybe Netflix ends up winning.
I’m afraid that, while I understand the emotional case here, Netflix is if anything a greater monopoly threat than Skydance. And while I understand that the political dimensions of a Skydance takeover are unique and distressing, it’s not at all clear to me that Netflix would be better for movies and television, creatively; in fact, a Netflix acquisition might even be artistically worse. The desperate, understandable desire to avoid a Paramount takeover has made otherwise clear-eyed people credulous about a company that has done more damage to the actual substance of film and television than any studio of my lifetime.
Netflix is if anything a greater monopoly threat than Skydance.
Start with the monopoly question, since it’s the one the anti-consolidation crowd often claims to care most about. Yes, indeed, I think it would be pernicious for the Ellisons to take over Warner Bros while owning all of the stuff they already own . But in terms of sheer muscle in the industry, the ability to dictate the creative and economic future of Hollywood? Netflix is the 800 pound gorilla, and it’s not even very close. Netflix has north of 300 million subscribers worldwide. Netflix not really one streamer among several; it’s the dominant longform video subscription platform on earth, and it has been for years. The only real competitor to Netflix is YouTube, which is an entirely separate animal. Run the Warner acquisition through the government’s own numbers and a Netflix-WBD combination would control something like a third of the streaming market, a jump in concentration far past the threshold at which the deal would lessen competition in a way bad for creatives and audiences. That’s part of why the Justice Department was circling Netflix under both the Clayton and Sherman Acts, and it’s why Netflix, for all of Ted Sarandos’s diplomacy in Washington, read the room in February and walked rather than raised its bid. Of course the whole process is corrupt. But please don’t underestimate what a dangerous level of influence Netflix already has in Hollywood or how much more it might gain if it took control of Warner Bros.
Think about what the Warner library actually would represent in Netflix’s hands: HBO, the DC characters, the Harry Potter machine, a century of back catalog. Handing that to the market leader doesn’t just make a big company bigger; it gives the incumbent, the industry powerhouse, the ability to wall its rivals off from content they currently license to survive – the textbook definition of foreclosure. Even the argument for Paramount, which I take no pleasure in making, rests on this: a Paramount-Warner combination at least builds a plausible number two streamer that can push back against Netflix, whereas a Netflix-Warner combination just crowns the king, probably for good. A lot of the people most frightened of consolidation have thus been rooting for the one deal that most cleanly fit the phrase “tends to create a monopoly.” Their instincts about Ellison are correct. Their instincts about Netflix’s relative influence as a potential monopoly force are simply not justifiable.
You should really have it out for Netflix.
And, look, if you hate all of this and long for the good old days, you should really have it out for Netflix. No company, none, has done more to damage the financial fundamentals of Hollywood than Netflix. No person, either, not Ellison or David Zaslav or any of the private-equity ghouls who’ve passed through. Netflix killed the old way of doing business. What worked for decades for movies was a release in movie theaters with about a 50/50 split with the theater owners, an exclusive window for theatrical that could last a year, and then release on physical media like VHS or DVD, a high-margin business that paid royalties and turned a lot of flops into hits. In television, you had your original network run of a show, where networks and affiliates split advertising spots and earnings, and then if a show was successful enough it was sold into syndication, where local television stations, cable channels, and foreign broadcasters rebroadcast old shows and took in advertising dollars. All of this was very profitable and it worked for creatives as well as corporations, with famous examples like the cast of Friends making a million dollars an episode. (Which was more than earned back by the show’s enormous syndication success.) Well, streaming has killed all of that , in a way that has had huge and negative effects on how movies and TV get made.
Consider the cost-plus model: Netflix pays a rich fee upfront, takes full ownership of the thing you made, and buys out the back end… which means little or nothing in the way of residuals, and little or nothing in the way of profit participation. No sharing in the upside of a show or movie that becomes a classic; you get your check, they get the asset and everything it ever earns, forever. This means that, among other things, a Jerry Seinfeld or Dick Wolf would have made far less money under the Netflix system than under the old system. But even if you’re not inclined to care about those old rich guys, you should prefer the old way of doing things. Royalties and residuals (that is, payments based on repeated airings of old movies and TV shows or sales of physical media) have famously kept a lot of working actors afloat when times are tough. Law & Order by itself is well known for having put a lot of kids of actors through college thanks to its constant syndication. The Netflix model wrecks the structure of the entire business, built up since the 1950s, an arrangement in which writers, directors, actors, and below-the-line craftspeople shared in the ongoing profits of the work they made. The hit that ran for a decade in syndication used to mint a middle class of people who weren’t stars. That mechanism was how a working writer might be able to buy a house.
The Netflix model wrecks the structure of the entire business.
Netflix broke it on purpose, and then everyone else copied it. Disney, the rest of the streamers, the legacy studios chasing Netflix’s model, all the way down.
The 2023 strikes SAG and WGA strikes were fundamentally an attempt to claw back a sliver of what Netflix had taken – the streaming “success” bonuses, the new SAG-AFTRA residual pool that only pays out if a show clears a stiff audience threshold in its first ninety days. That stuff was worth fighting for, but it was a rear guard action, a fund measured in the low hundreds of millions against an industry the streamers have revalued in the hundreds of billions. And because Netflix doesn’t need its own titles to be profitable in any conventional sense, its completely scrambled the meaning of the word “success” in the entertainment industry. A studio used to be a machine for converting creative labor into durable assets with shared upside; now the sharing part is almost gone. Netflix changed Hollywood into a machine for producing disposable, work-for-hire content that Netflix owns outright and discards at will. You can remove David Ellison from his perch, but you can’t put the cost-plus model genie back into the bottle; that financial damage is the deeper story. Cheering for the company that inflicted it is such a strange thing for people who love Hollywood to do.
And then there’s the creative work itself. I’m baffled that more people aren’t scared by Netflix potentially imposing their recent art-destroying production rules on Warner Bros projects. Because everything Netflix has been doing for several years ultimately hurts creators and their creations! Start with the Netflix look . There have been, over the last few years, a number of complaints about how recent Netflix shows have been shot. When they first started making their own shows, like House of Cards , Netflix clearly endeavored to make them look professional and artistic – that is, those shows tended to reflect industry best practices in lighting and cinematography because Netflix was eager to demonstrate its legitimacy. But in recent years, with Netflix now the dominant player, viewers and critics have noticed that the streamer’s shows mostly look like shit, and in consistent ways: a flat, over-lit, over-saturated sameness; night interiors washed in neon for no reason that’s justified by the scene; everyone lined up horizontally in the same weird medium shot; the dutch angle wildly overused as a signal that Something Is Wrong; faces lit so evenly the makeup looks like makeup , every seam and pore rendered in that clean, dead, high-def clarity.
Visual sameness is the system.
None of this is an accident. It’s all downstream of Netflix’s own technical mandates: approved-camera lists, uniform delivery specs imposed across wildly different productions, and an economic philosophy that lavishes money on marketing and up-front talent while starving the budgets for design, location, and craft expenses, especially (apparently) the unfashionable craft of lighting. Many have speculated that the demand here is to be able to be able to “fix it in post,” that is, to shoot in such a way that editors and effects artists have the most pliable footage to work with to make changes after shooting… the better for Netflix brass to manipulate the final product, naturally. But shooting to preserve options in post and shooting to make something look good are very different goals. The predictable result is that a two hundred million dollar Netflix movie can look like a soap opera someone shot over a weekend. Visual sameness isn’t a failure of the Netflix system, visual sameness is the system. It’s cheaper to standardize, and standardization is safe as far as pleasing subscribers goes, and that safety is the aesthetic value Netflix holds most deeply. It’s all about homogenization as key to consistent financial performance, the better to maximize #shareholder value. And that’s why so much on Netflix is an oversaturated uncanny valley nightmare.
You can watch this decay happen inside a single show, over a decade: Stranger Things , one of Netflix’s true success stories.
It would be a major understatement to say that I am not a fan of Stranger Things , which I find a very cynical and very contemporary piece of work in its fundamentally childish view of the world, its efforts to inspire parasocial attachment in its audience, and its refusal to make artistic choices. But one thing I will absolutely argue is that the first season looks fantastic. When that first season came out, back when Netflix’s place in entertainment was far less secure, many people lauded the show for looking like a movie. The nostalgia that’s core to the show’s appeal may turn me off in narrative terms, but the visual look of the first season embodied that nostalgia with remarkable success; as everybody said, it looked like the 80s, in ways that went beyond costuming and props.
A still from Stranger Things on Netflix.
Notice how much negative space is being used here, a willingness to make the subject of the shot small in the frame, which illustrates isolation, loneliness, a lack of power…. That season’s muted colors, soft Leica lenses, warm practical lights and deep, richly textured shadows, it all made Hawkins, Indiana feel both real and fantastical and, at all times, identifiably 80s. If anything, the production team seems to have deliberately avoided the flat, overlit appearance that’s traditionally been common in television, preserving detail in the darkness and contrasting amber interiors with cold blue moonlight. There’s goddamn shadows in the show because it was attempting to capture something that looked real, and in real life there’s shadows. Let’s look at two basement scenes, filmed about a decade apart for the same streaming company.
A still from Stranger Things on Netflix.
This is naturalistic lighting. Of course there’s all manner of artificial lighting being used here, but you can see that there’s great effort invested in making it look like the scene is actually lit by the available lighting sources in the basement. There’s also tons of shadow, as you’d expect in a basement scene. That naturalism is very important for the show; you could argue that the whole game lies in contrasting the mundane world of Hawkins with “the Upside Down” and the fantasy creatures that emerge from it. And now, the fifth and final season!
A still from Stranger Things on Netflix.
Just look at the difference. I could point out how the frame is overstuffed with characters, but let’s stick with lighting. Where is all that light coming from? They’re in a basement! Who put a spotlight on Will? Why is light pouring from his book? What is happening here? And aesthetically it has none of the moodiness or character of the first season. In general the last season looked awful . I wouldn’t call it cheap, exactly, because it was no doubt hideously expensive to shoot. What’s clear though is that every image in the season was processed until no trace of ordinary physical reality remained. The intimate gloom of the first season was replaced by floodlights, colored haze, sweeping camera moves, shallow-focus close-ups, enormous stage constructions and digital environments with every surface was lacquered in the same synthetic Netflix sheen.
A still from Stranger Things on Netflix.
Here’s everything wrong with the Netflix look. The image is horribly oversaturated, the colors like one of those YouTube videos designed to show off your OLED TV. ( There’s a lot of that. ) The characters are lit in a totally flat style; the natural light and how it would appear in the scene is ignored. ( There’s a lot of that. ) The characters are standing in the same focal plane in a horizontal line, again to make it easier in post. ( There’s a lot of that , in this show’s later seasons and in Netflix shows and movies in general.) And perhaps most depressing of all, you’ll notice that 60% of the frame is irrelevant, with the only visual interest in the center. ( There’s a lot of that. ) Why? Well, I suspect it’s because they hoped that would make it more likely that clips from the show would be put on TikTok and Instagram, for free viral marketing! So depressing.
The company makes TV and movies for people who are half on their phones.
This was a production encompassing hundreds of shooting days and dozens of sets, reportedly costing $50 million to $60 million an episode; in pure workload it really was like shooting eight movies. Yet all that labor and money produced images that feel weightless, shapeless, backgrounds smeared into a blur, sets visibly announcing themselves as sets, red and blue light poured indiscriminately over actors, monsters that seem less frightening the more clearly and extravagantly they’re displayed…. Viewers complained specifically about overlighting, fake-looking sets, excessive depth of field effects and an overpowering “green screen look.” The first season used visual restraint to make Hawkins seem like a real town into which something impossible had intruded; the fifth turned the show into a kind of televisual theme park ride – garish, airless, and fundamentally artificial in its basic feel. All of it represents a company learning, season by season, to distrust the creatives it hires, which points to a kind of corruption underneath the look, one that actually rots the storytelling.
Aside from ease of postproduction, why would Netflix create so many garish, flat, over-detailed shows? Because the company makes TV and movies for people who are half on their phones, as a matter of stated policy . Multiple people involved in the Netflix creative process have reported that screenwriters have been ordered by executives to “have this character announce what they’re doing” so that a viewer with the show “on in the background” can follow along. The reasoning is very 21st century and very dark: if the viewer’s real screen is the phone, the show on the wall can’t be so demanding that it makes them switch it off. This is a company that has studied in attention and then optimized for it. Netflix does not particularly want your eyes on its #content. They just want your subscription and your ambient tolerance. They’ve engineered their product accordingly.
This all ends up as a slop factory. The typical Netflix movie is algorithmically shaped to the platform’s thousands of “taste clusters,” titled for search (including, I swear to God, a murder mystery named Murder Mystery ) and apparently sometimes greenlit by executives who never read the script. And the only defense I can find from those who stump for the Netflix acquisition is “They won’t do that with Warner Bros.” To which I say… really? Why not? Why wouldn’t they? Why would you trust them? Because they say so? The company that makes stars as big as Matt Damon and Ben Affleck repeatedly summarize the plot so that half-watching zombies can follow along, they’re not going to do the same thing to Warner Bros… why? Because Warner Bros is special to you? They’re going to preserve the theatrical experience, despite decades of hostility to that experience, because they promised? Come on, you guys. Don’t fall in love with corporations , especially in the entertainment industry.
Netflix has spent a decade lowering everyone’s expectations.
You would, of course, prefer that neither of them win – that we could have entertainment companies that aren’t mere parts of giant-er corporations. But that’s just too much to ask for, in the 21st century.
Yes, fear the Ellisons, fear the industry consolidation, fear the political capture, fear the layoffs, fear the buried films. That fear is legitimate and I feel it too. But I ask you: what’s it doing to your broader judgment? The reason Netflix can pass for the good guy in this fight is not that Netflix is good . It’s that Netflix has spent a decade lowering everyone’s expectations so thoroughly, so successfully, that the company that broke Hollywood’s economics and turned its craft into wallpaper can now, in a pinch, be mistaken for a friend of the artist. The lesser-evil framing just shows how bad things are. And, look, if you want to say that there’s no good Warner Bros ending on the table, well, maybe you’re right. There’s the deal that would put enormous power in Hollywood in the hands of a right-wing billionaire family, and there’s the deal that would concentrate even more of it in the hands of the company that already did the most damage to the artforms we all love. Choosing between them is grim, thankless work. And if you want to make a wish on the monkey’s paw for Netflix to win, I guess I understand. But if you find yourself feeling relieved at the thought of Netflix winning, if the slop factory starts to look like a refuge, I’d gently suggest that it isn’t hope you’re feeling. It’s just a measure of how bleak things have gotten, the logic of the abused.
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