After weeks of seeming like Warner Bros. Discovery bosses were engaging in corporate bread-crumbing — as if the studio was in a flirty situationship with two wealthy suitors and couldn’t make up their pretty little heads about which they want to let gut their company — suddenly Netflix broke things off late Thursday, paving the way for a massive new corporate marriage (and if there were an actual wedding, with all the impacted employees invited as guests, everybody would be drinking very heavily).
Below is your up-to-the-minute version of Who Won and Lost the Week: The Great Netflix Pull-Out Edition – plus some Tyra Banks, Shia LaBeouf and those bloody awful BAFTAs.
WON: Paramount Skydance. Pending approvals, the company won its grueling months-long battle to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put assets such as WarnerBros. Pictures, HBO and CNN under the control of Trump-supporting David Ellison (guess J.K. Rowling doesn’t have to worry about HBO’s Harry Potter series having, for instance, a trans Luna Lovegood, while Anderson Cooper is running out of news organizations to seemingly quit in protest). It also means Paramount acquiring roughly $60 billion in debt, which is a manner of winning only the insanely rich can get feel good about. Paramount beating Netflix is supposedly the better option for helping prop up moviegoing as Paramount does invest in major event films and few believed Netflix’s pledges to protect a traditional business model that it has tried to undermine for decades. But it’s the less-good option for those worried about Ellison’s political ideology infecting more news and entertainment brands.
WON: David Zaslav. It’s inarguable: The WBD boss played his cards just right. Paramount’s first offer was $19 a share. Paramount’s winning offer was $31 (plus coughing up a bunch of billion-dollar incentives). The man stands to personally make more than $600 million. Unfortunately for all those working under him, Paramount reportedly plans $6 billion in cuts, which means massive layoffs. Zaslav won, but he might have to sell his $16 million L.A. mansion due to all those torches and pitchforks at his gate.
LOST: Netflix. This feels good. Not because we’re anti-Netflix. Netflix is the first streamer I open when I want to watch a show or movie that’s firmly entertaining but not fantastic (and when I want a plot explained to me repeatedly because I’m on my phone). But Netflix is the most successful streamer, has incredibly deep pockets and — frankly — they shouldn’t get everything they want all the time. Perhaps boss Ted Sarandos strategically needed to project “of course we’re going to beat Paramount” smugness throughout his merger haggling (complete with the above, now-hilarious premature victory photo-op). But Netflix still came off like a company that hasn’t heard the word “no” since back when they were stuffing DVDs into red envelopes. So there was something satisfying about Netflix being forced to take their algorithmic toys and go home, even if it was also a move that boosted their stock price and earned them a $2.8 billion break-up fee (yes, this is a world where you can make $2.8 billion for somebody rejecting your offer). Of course, you could say much of the same about Ellison if he didn’t get his way for once.
LOST: CNN: A news network that’s been in a depressive spiral for a long, long time just got more bad news, with the prospect of Bari Weiss — or somebody ideologically similar — wresting control of “The Most Trusted Name in News.” While the prospect of anybody putting their political thumb on the scale of any news organization is firmly BAD, let’s add some context here: In our increasingly fractured media landscape, when Joe Rogan has roughly 12 million listeners, the fate of the Republic doesn’t hinge on the precise level of political spin being fed to CNN’s 600,000 average nightly viewers.
WON: James Cameron. While everybody else had their fingers to the wind and didn’t want to ruffle feathers in the merger fight between two powerful studios, Cameron came out swinging hard against Netflix in its bid to acquire WBD. Not just with a press statement, but by sending a letter to Senator Mike Lee, chair of a Senate antitrust subcommittee. Sure, Mark Ruffalo criticized Cameron for his letter, but Ruffalo would protest a sandwich (also, the actor missed the point — Cameron wasn’t saying “I love studio mergers,” he was advocating for what he saw as the lesser of two evils for Hollywood jobs and protecting cinemas given a merger was, one way or the other, inevitable). Netflix’s Ted Sarandos likewise ripped Cameron, but Sarandos would still cheerfully kill to acquire a single new Cameron film over a hundred Red Notices and Rebel Moons. Once again: Never bet against James Cameron.
WON: George R.R. Martin/Game of Thrones-Verse: Okay, I might be a bit biased on this. But A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms got series high ratings for its debut season finale, with some of the highest-rated episodes for the franchise on IMDB, and proved HBO can make a short, cheap-ish GoT spin-off and earn a surprising amount of love from the fandom. While House of the Dragon — which fans have been piling on for its stultifying second season — released a third season trailer that looks action-packed and exciting (but can the show’s dialogue scenes next season also be exciting?). While saga creator George R.R. Martin — who HBO is starting to realize is perhaps actually worth listening to now that he’s made them billions across now three hit TV shows — will open a play, Game of Thrones: The Mad King, at the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Theater. For a franchise HBO has never seemed entirely convinced was a franchise, it finally looks like one now, 15 years after the release of Game of Thrones.
LOST: BAFTAS/The BBC: Nothing about the controversy that unfolded at the awards show earlier this week was remotely funny. Except perhaps this: The BAFTAs’ effort to be as inclusive as possible resulted in the most offensive possible thing happening for all involved. Ranking the bad decisions from least to most bad: The producers’ awful “if you are offended” non-apology that poor host Alan Cumming had to say during the telecast; the utter lack of apology to presenters Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo — until there was a massive next-day uproar, made the BAFTAs’ belated groveling statement look meaningless; and finally: The BBC deciding to not edit out the repeatedly shouted n-word out of the telecast, which was on a two-hour delay, despite Warner Bros. reportedly urging them to do so. Trainwrecks happen all the time at live shows, but seldom has one been easier to predict in advance, and BAFTA and the BBC should have been better prepared.
LOST: Tyra Banks: You know who was rooting for you Tyra? Unfortunately nobody this week. One can argue over whether America’s Top Model was really the cultural war crime Netflix’s Reality Check documentary made it out to be. But it now seems fair to assume participating in documentaries looking to “reexamine the legacy” of anything you’ve been involved with is probably a bad idea. It’s also a pretty bad sign when the only celebrity publicly coming to your defense, Adrienne Curry, hedges her comments by calling you an “asshole” and “a dickhead” and closes by telling you to “f*ck off.”
LOST: Shia LaBeouf: We shouldn’t say people with addiction issues have “lost.” But whether it’s Shia LaBeouf, or somebody like the late Matthew Perry — somebody who is famous and wealthy and has been open about their issues and then kept slipping … everybody silently thinks the same thing: You have all the resources in the world — and all the potential love and support in the world — not to be an idiot. But there was the Transformers actor, with his tattoos and pirate beard, behaving like the obnoxious guy at the bar who spoils everybody else’s night, getting into a fight, then continuing to party the next day after his high-profile arrest. In a rather major understatement, the judge told him, “Clearly you don’t take your alcohol problems seriously.” It’s journalistic tradition, when referring to an actor for the second time in a news story, to use their best-known credit (like above). Shia: Don’t you eventually want to make a great and popular film that replaces “Transformers actor” in these stories?
