Corporate Hollywood has undergone huge upheavals in recent years – as consequential, perhaps, as the 1970s and 80s, when the studio marques that had made their names in the movies’ golden age were being bought up by international conglomerates. The acquisition of Warner Bros – legendary for crime pictures in the 40s and 50s, and Batman movies in the 90s and 00s – by a streaming service feels particularly significant, coming as it does on the back of the merger of Paramount with Skydance Media earlier this year and, in 2019, Disney’s purchase of fellow studio 21st Century Fox.
What is most evident in all these deals is how streaming services have changed the game. Disney’s buying spree – which had previously included Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar – in retrospect looks essentially like preparatory positioning to increase the marketability of their Disney+ player. It is significant that the new Paramount regime’s first move was to prise Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer away from Netflix. And Netflix, of course, have made their billions by upending the traditional pitch-session-to-cinema pipeline that had sustained the film industry for decades. They have signed up legions of the classiest directors, hogged nearly all the audience-friendly documentaries and premiered one water-cooler series after another.
So what do Netflix get out of buying Warner Bros? Is it really the end of big screen cinema as we know it? Partly, of course, Netflix is getting its hands on successful IP (intellectual property), the most valuable commodity in today’s entertainment industry. (In this case, it’s DC Universe movies, Harry Potter, Barbie and Game of Thrones.) But there’s something else at play here: for all its success, there are two things Netflix wants and has never achieved. First is to win the Academy Award for best picture and, second, to make a proper blockbuster movie. It’s well to remember that Netflix is a US corporation, not the radical guerrilla outfit it sometimes presents itself as; the Netflix suits like rubbing shoulders with other studio suits at the Oscars, which after all is Hollywood’s ultimate end-of-year knees-up. And they want their films to be at the heart of mainstream American culture in the same way their TV shows are; something that has hitherto eluded them, except on sporadic occasions.
The other point to remember about Netflix is that for much of its life it has made its money by selling subscriptions to its platform; individual film results didn’t matter to the bottom line, other than to attract more subscribers and reward talent on performance-related deals. That will have changed when Netflix started to show ads – the better a film does, the more they can charge – and perhaps the company’s internal culture has slowly morphed towards a more traditional studio type than before. Certainly – to considerable relief on the part of cinema operators everywhere – Netflix gradually realised the benefits of showing their films in cinemas, especially their more prestige items. Partly it has major marketing benefit (even if it won’t make them that much money); partly it keeps the big names happy, who can’t turn up at a red carpet event for a streaming premiere; and partly because it’s the way to qualify for an Oscar.
There’s still the question of the “window” – the period of exclusivity physical theatres get to show a film before it heads to home entertainment formats – and it’s significant that Netflix moved quickly to reassure cinemas that Warner Bros’ current slate of films will still be released on the big screen. That being said, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos did say the window would “evolve”; it doesn’t take much reading of the runes to realise that will mean any film will be yanked out of cinemas on to streaming platforms as soon as it has served its purpose.
In the end, though, the reason Netflix bought Warner Bros is surely to get its hands on the machinery of making big-scale, big-money, big-screen entertainment; something it’s tried and failed to do in the past. With money-trap efforts like The Electric State, The Gray Man and Red Notice failing to set the world on fire, the company has found to its considerable cost that making blockbuster films is a lot trickier than it looks. With access to Warner Bros it now has a fighting chance.
