REGINA – Well, folks, it is fair to say these are sad and tense times in Hollywood.
I am mindful of the fact that I am writing this column on the day after news broke of the killings of director and actor Rob Reiner and his wife Michele in Brentwood, which simply adds to the gloomy atmosphere that seems to surround that place these days.
My sense of things is that the gloom and doom of the last few years has come to a head, if it has not happened already. The entire industry seems to be on edge. Part of it is from the decimation of the industry seen during the COVID-19 era which shut down basically the entire movie-making and movie-distribution industry.
Part of it is from the decimation of the industry seen from the dual strikes of 2023 by the writers and actors.
Part of it is from the changes seen to the industry with the shift away from movie-going at the theatres to content consumption at home in front of the TV screen.
Part of it is the pressure seen from content creators on YouTube and TikTok and everywhere else.
And part of it is the growing and real threat that artificial intelligence could have on actors' jobs, writers' jobs, intellectual property and all the rest of it.
Add to that the flight of production out of California, as well as the rise of a Presidential administration of Donald Trump that is openly hostile to Hollywood and to California. It's an administration that is clearly enjoying flexing its muscles and putting all sorts of pressure on Hollywood studios in terms of the content they put out — not to mention threatening tariffs on runaway production out of the country.
Things are boiling over in Hollywood all at once. And that is the backdrop to what we are seeing play out right now before our very eyes with the corporate fight to take over Warner Bros.Discovery.
This fall the struggling movie and media conglomerate put itself up for sale, and three suitors came forward in that corporate battle: Comcast (Universal), Paramount Skydance, and Netflix. The fight pitted two of the most storied studios in Hollywood as well as their legacy network TV entities (NBC and CBS, respectively), up against the relative upstart streaming behemoth of Netflix.
The takeover battle — which made the RJR Nabisco takeover look tame by comparison — ended on Dec. 5 when WBD announced Netflix had won the bidding for WBD's streaming and studio entities.
But remember, this is Hollywood, and Hollywood loves its sequels. We are fully into Part II of this story, with Paramount launching a full-on hostile takeover attempt with an all-cash offer at $30 a share. What's more, Paramount is going after not just the studio and streaming assets, but the TV assets as well including your favourite cable channels such as TNT and CNN, which were left out of the original deal with Netflix. And they are threatening to go even higher than the $30 a share
Clearly, this sequel is shaping up to be juicier than the original story, with rumors the Trump Administration might get involved and stick its nose into which entity ends up getting the WB.
I cannot pretend to know all of the inside baseball of what's going on with this corporate takeover. I come at this as just the ordinary consumer of content, as someone who loves my DC comics and my Looney Tunes cartoons, and who wants the best for that portion of it in the grand scheme of things.
All I know is that corporate takeovers and mergers in the movie industry are never good. I've seen what's happened to studios like United Artists and 20th Century Fox, and how they became shells of their former selves following corporate takeovers. What I am really concerned about is what happens to the legacy of Warner Bros., the studio of Superman and Batman, and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and my personal favourites Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner.
A lot of people have been going on social media and have been openly rooting for one side or the other in this takeover battle, and I just can't get into it. It just seems to me that no matter who wins, we'll lose.
On social media I see a lot of hostility towards Netflix potentially closing this deal, and it mainly has to do with all the flashpoints I spoke about earlier. Netflix is not the legacy Hollywood player in this battle. Instead, they are seen as the upstarts who will stand the studio system on its ear.
There is a lot of concern that if Netflix wins, they will then put the priority on streaming ahead of theatrical releases — so that Netflix can become the dominant force in distribution. That would threaten the royalties to actors, writers and everyone else from traditional theatrical releases. The other concern is that with the acquisition of WBD they will take over the HBO Max streaming platform and potentially put it out of business, and corner the market on streaming for its newly acquired WB content.
The other criticism being levelled at Netflix is that they are supposedly on the forefront of the use of "AI" and are bent on ramping that up, and there are fears they will put every actor and writer in Hollywood out of work. Now, I don't know how rational this fear is. I think there is a lot of pushback from the public to AI and to the idea of phony computer-generated actors and actresses being used in these artificially-made productions. You would think Netflix would be interested in serving up productions that the public won't consume, but I could be wrong. The bottom line is all of this talk gives you an idea of the fear that is rampant out there from both the movie fans as well as those actually in the industry.
On the flip side, what do we make of Paramount's bid? What if they somehow are able to win this takeover battle. They claim they will release 30 studio releases a year. Fine. But what of the long-term future of Warner Bros. as a standalone entity? Will we see a real commitment to the "WB" side of the business in the future?
This just reminds me too much of what happened when Disney swallowed up 20th Century Fox a few years ago. It's more consolidation.
Also, what happens to cable channels like TNT, and CNN? If Paramount takes it over we might finally see the CNN-CBS News merger that had long been talked about for years, but which never came to pass because of competing ownership. As for streaming, the future of HBO Max would still be in question, regardless, because of Paramount Plus.
There are a lot of regulatory and antitrust hurdles that still stand in the way of a deal getting done, and that may ultimately determine which media conglomerate ends up taking over one of the most storied studios in Hollywood history.
But needless to say, there are a lot of nervous people out there in the entertainment world about all that is happening. It seems like all of the tension and turmoil, and all of the bad news of this whole decade for the motion picture industry is boiling over all at once, again.
Employees for the studios are worried about their jobs. Actors, writers, producers and directors are worried about the future of their projects. Theatre owners and cinema chains are worried they will be cut out of future releases in favour of streaming. And the movie fans at home are worried not only about what this means to their favourite franchises, but what it means to ticket prices and to streaming prices and streaming options in general. If there are fewer streaming options, prices are sure to go up.
What more can be said about this than … happy holidays? Merry Christmas? Ho, ho, ho.
