Now on the precipice of success, Sarandos is threatening to create one of the most damaging media conglomerates in the history of motion picture entertainment. The result will be more layoffs in Hollywood, fewer and lower-quality movies in theaters around the world, and at higher prices. The deal, which is motivated first and foremost by greed—Zaslav stands to earn $567 million from the sale, potentially making him a billionaire—should not just be blocked. Both companies should be broken up for parts, their streaming platforms spun off. The fact that the merger has even been agreed upon proves that a much deeper, more sinister takeover has already been completed: The studios are willingly charting a different future for entertainment.
This article is all over the place.
The author points out from the outset that Warner Brothers has been a disaster for both creatives and profiteers under Zaslav for the last 5 years; he’s a wrecking ball of man and his friends (personal and political) paint a picture of a piece of shit.
It then points out that equally huge (or hugher?) piece of shit David Ellison had made a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros to merge it with Paramount, which would be assisted by his pals Trump and Kushner, which he quickly moves on from without mentioning that it would definitely be bad for the future of cinema, and media competition creating a huge media conglomerate.
Next there’s some Netflix history which is more than a little slanted towards the Hollywood elitist, and the Netflix CEO (Sarandos) is painted as the bad guy for pointing out that cinema is dying because everyone has pretty good, large TVs and fast internet nowadays and the cinema is expensive as fuck. Only to state that these statements “are misleading”… but then back it up with… Agreeing?
Like… If your counterargument to Sarandos’s statements about the cinema industry dying is “yeah well only by most metrics and you’re twisting it because it’s largely Warner Bros fault” that is a terribly counter-argument.
Even more baffling is the claim:
The DC Universe is WB’s leading success story? The universe with famously more flops than box office winners??
I agree with his assessments that the buyout and merger will be bad for cinemas, competition, are likely in breech of antitrust laws, and I agree with his assessment that the companies should be broke up - but the meat of this article feels like it’s so out of touch with reality.
In reality, antitrust will not happen - Trump hates regulations and he loves bribes, so one of three things will happen. And if the choice is between Zaslav continuing to fuck WB, Ellison buying out and merging it with Paramount, or Netflix absorbing WB… The least-shit choice to me is obvious.
Didn’t they also cancel a bunch of smaller projects for tax reasons
I can think of Batgirl (~2022) off the top of my head. Which cost $90mil and completed, but shelved to write it off as a huge tax loss with Hollywood accounting no doubt inflating the numbers everywhere.
What’s interesting is that it cost as much as their success story ‘Sinners (2025)’ which was also predicted to be a box office flop by many industry insiders, yet went on to success. So who knows… they may have tossed a hit for a tax write off.
Wile E Coyote movie too, I’m really hoping that eventually surfaces because it was produced by James Gunn and had a bunch of talented people involved. Will Forte, who’s humour I really enjoy:
IIRC there was also a small-time Scooby Doo movie Zaslav killed that was already all but finished. Doubt it would have been good or anything special, but another example of them killing a complete project just to write it off.
Edit: found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoob!_Holiday_Haunt