"The film-industry panic sparked by the news of Netflix's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. has been immediate and intense, and in the days immediately after, it was hard to find anyone not named David Zaslav (the head of the studio's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery) who was happy about the prospect. The C.E.O. of the movie-theatre trade group Cinema United called the deal "an unprecedented threat" and the Writers Guild said, "This merger must be blocked." And the ranks of its opponents included not just antitrust guards, such as Elizabeth Warren, but also one of the industry's biggest and newest tycoons, David Ellison, whose company, Skydance Media, acquired Paramount (and, with it, CBS) earlier this year, to become Paramount Skydance. He'd been trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, in its entirety, for months and has launched a hostile-takeover bid."
"The proposed merger is only the latest of many takeovers, ranging from propitious to preposterous, that have marked the film business for more than half a century, with movie studios traded from hand to hand like baseball cards. The studio now called Sony was originally Columbia Pictures, founded in 1924, which Coca-Cola bought in 1982 and sold, seven years later, to the Japanese electronics titan. M-G-M was purchased by the financier Kirk Kerkorian in 1969, and in the nineteen-eighties he passed it, or parts of it, back and forth with the media mogul Ted Turner like a hot potato, until it landed with Sony, in 2005. Today, it's owned by a subsidiary of Amazon."
The film-industry panic sparked by Netflix's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. was immediate and intense, with most industry figures expressing dismay. The movie-theatre trade group's C.E.O. labeled the deal an "unprecedented threat," and the Writers Guild demanded, "This merger must be blocked." Opposition included antitrust voices like Elizabeth Warren and rival David Ellison, whose Skydance Media recently acquired Paramount to form Paramount Skydance and has launched a hostile bid for Warner Bros. The proposed takeover follows a long history of studio sales and swaps, including Columbia's sale to Coca-Cola and Japan, MGM's transfers, and studios now owned by tech-company subsidiaries.
Read at The New Yorker
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