Late Thursday night, the fierce bidding war to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery concluded with its Board of Directors choosing Netflix based on its $72 billion bid for the studio and streaming assets of the media giant. While the two parties will now enter into exclusive negotiations to hammer out the details of the transaction, the plans remain in place for WBD to spin off its linear television and cable properties into a stand-alone company that will chart an independent course forward.
Word of Netflix’s winning bid was first reported by Bloomberg, and confirmed shortly thereafter by the Wall Street Journal. The news sent shock waves throughout the media world, both in terms of the widespread scope of its coverage and the intense feelings it provoked. Longtime Hollywood columnist Sharon Waxman offers an opinion piece in today’s Sunday edition of the New York Times entitled, “Everybody in Hollywood Secretly Hates Netflix. So Now What?”
In a call with his company’s shareholders on Friday morning, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos sought to assuage concerns that Netflix would stop releasing Warner Bros. movies in theatres, saying that “WBD films will continue to go to the theaters through WBD, and Netflix movies will take the same strides they have, which is, some of them do have a short run in the theater beforehand.” However, he leaned back into his well-known historical stance on theatrical releasing, saying that the 45-day theatrical window is “not consumer-friendly” and that Netflix would “evolve” the theatrical windows from this current model.
Needless to say, anyone with a stake in supporting movie theatres is wary of Netflix’s intentions. Cinema United, the U.S.-based trade association of motion picture exhibitors, issued a strongly worded statement that characterized Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. as “an unprecedented threat” to movie theatres worldwide. President and CEO Michael O’Leary said plainly that “Netflix’s stated business model does not support theatrical exhibition. In fact, it is the opposite.”
