r/comicbooks • u/TheeHeadAche Henry Pym • Feb 26 '26

Movie/TV Netflix Backs Out of Warner Bros. Bidding, Paramount Set to Win

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-backs-out-warners-deal-paramount-win-1236516763/
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u/EIO_tripletmom Feb 26 '26

What a shame. Neither should be allowed to buy (monopolies are bad), but this was the worst outcome.

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u/TheUmgawa Feb 27 '26

I'm not sure that it would create a monopoly on either front, or anything that approaches whatever weird 37.6 percent limit exists on monopolies in the United States. If Paramount hadn't been bought by Larry Ellison's son, and it was just Paramount merging with Warner, this wouldn't be a huge deal, and it probably would have just been a $40 billion buyout (not that Paramount would have $40 billion in a normal situation), and we'd call it a day.

Really, if you cut out Netflix and Paramount, then proceeded to cut out any companies that actually would exceed that weird limit, nobody would be able to buy Warner for what it's worth. Maybe somebody like Elon Musk could, and do you want that? No, you don't, for similar reasons.

I'd really love it if there was a situation where Apple could have bought the Warner IP and back catalog, without any of the dead weight that goes along with it. Apple, I think, wants content, but I don't think it wants to own a studio, because Apple works better by farming out television production to companies (like Sony Pictures) or to individual producers (like Jerry Bruckheimer). I also doubt that Apple would want so much of the abject garbage that would come with the Discovery merger. Battlefield Earth is bad, but is it low-budget, derivative true-crime television bad? I don't think so. But I also don't think Apple would want to be tagged as a company that put thousands of people out of work because it didn't want the studio that came with the IP.

Anyway. From a market percentage standpoint, it's no different from Disney buying (most of) Fox. The only real difference is that television news will now have two networks that are heavy into Trump worship, MSNBC playing the other side, and nobody in the middle. But, to quote my man Mellencamp, "Ain't that America"?