Netflix or Paramount: Who will be the best new owner of Warner Bros? | Warner Bros

IIt’s not unusual for a corporate merger to take months and months to actually close, but even by those standards, the bidding for the Warner Bros Discovery property has been extended. Netflix struck a deal to buy the Warner Bros. side of the company — the studio and streaming businesses — late last year, but Paramount Skydance has been undeterred, aggressively pursuing what it claims is a better pitch for the entire WBD operation. After several failed attempts at a hostile takeover, WBD is considering a final offer from Paramount, which Netflix would have the opportunity to counter. What we have is what educated film scholars might refer to as an Alien v Predator situation, in homage to Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox: whoever wins, we lose.

This means that for cinephiles, casual viewers, and people in the film industry, the ideal outcome would be for Warner Bros. to continue as its own entity: an entertainment company that makes movies and TV series. But that’s clearly not going to happen — and any number of relatively superior options have not been floated in the past year, such as the idea of ​​Apple, which worked with the studio on the global production and Best Picture nominee F1, buying Warner instead. It’s still a huge company, but it has shown a willingness to spend on major (and theatrically released!) projects like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and it has such a thriving business in other areas that it can afford to run Warner as a true studio, in an attempt to continue the company’s recent hot streak.

That’s a pipe dream now, though. So which alien and/or predator would be the best score for people who already like the movies?

And none other than James Cameron appeared to be speaking in favor of the latter when he denigrated a potential Netflix deal as “disastrous” for the film industry in a letter to Senator Mike Lee. Cameron has pointed out, as have others, that Netflix’s business model not only avoids the traditional theatrical path — it seems outright hostile to it. (Some of the company’s films are only released theatrically, usually outside of major chains and for a limited time; this is done primarily for award-qualifying purposes and/or to please big-name filmmakers.) Netflix appears to view cinemas as competition, rather than complement, to the future of home video.

This sometimes conflicts with potential profit. No matter how many times a movie has done well on streaming because it was a theatrical release first, Netflix has steadfastly refused to make deals that would put its films in a regular wide release before streaming. Conversely, they seem more eager to come up with ways for work that’s already on Netflix, like KPop Demon Hunters or the series finale of Stranger Things, to appear specifically in national theater chains, rather than just letting Guillermo del Toro’s film actually play on a few thousand screens for a few months before it hits the streamer. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has had plenty of opportunities to support the theatrical market before; Why would a Warner Bros buyout convince him to start?

Paramount Skydance, on the other hand, is very much a traditional studio. Their streaming service was never fully launched, which means it was never fully taken over. Paramount released nine films in theaters last year, including a sci-fi remake (The Running Man), an old-fashioned character-driven drama (Roofman), a romantic drama (Regretting You), a big-budget sequel Mission: Impossible, and two children’s cartoons. Their schedule for 2026 is less diverse – lots of sequels and horror – but larger in number, with nearly a dozen titles. Unlike 20th Century Fox, whose output now largely consists of direct-to-Hulu films for its parent company Disney, Warner Bros. probably won’t become a streaming brand for its new owners. Her films will continue to appear in theaters.

The question is how many of these films will there be? Warner released 11 films in US theaters in 2025, and after a rocky start, most of them turned out to be huge hits. They have 15 films scheduled for 2026 (including the current one Wuthering Heights). Will the combined studio be prepared to show 20 to 30 films in theaters each year?

Paramount claims that’s more or less the plan. However, it seems more realistic to expect something closer to Paramount’s release schedules of years past, where they might run as many as 15 or 16 titles in a big year, using the Warner Bros. pipeline to supplement their production rather than doubling it entirely. This, in turn, raises questions about what Warner Bros.’s anthology films will look like. Warner has a lot of big franchises on offer, just as Fox did with Disney. It’s easy enough to envision WB’s shield becoming a de facto brand for DC superhero movies, Conjuring-verse sequels, and whatever can be mined from the Harry Potter waste of this IP – just as 20th Century Studios’ theatrical releases are primarily Avatar, Planet of the Apes, or – yes, the Alien and/or Predator films.

Think about it: Make Warner movies like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, or Maggie Gyllenhaal’s upcoming female-directed horror musical The Bride! Does this sound like the kind of risk that Paramount’s David Ellison would be willing to take amid his initiative to make “flag-waving patriotic” films like Call of Duty? Ellison appears willing to greenlight Rush Hour 4 as a favor to Brett Ratner and an appeasement to Donald Trump — so one of his big plans to revitalize the studio is to produce a belated third installment directed by a man accused of sexual misconduct at the behest of a fascist. Ellison certainly wants to see the movies in theaters, but it’s hard to imagine him flirting with good movies. Netflix, on the other hand, has maintained its relationships with filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, David Fincher, and Noah Baumbach, and acquired smaller titles like Train Dreams. The company also produces a lot of DTV junk, but its actual output seems relatively consistent with the Warner Bros. legacy, and Sarandos has been increasingly insistent that it plans to keep Warner Bros. operationally intact, not turn it into a Netflix tile.

None of this makes Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros a cause for joy. All of these mergers and acquisitions are designed to stifle competition and encourage corporate dominance in an industry that performs clearly better with greater consumer diversity. Paramount’s general greed is exactly why these consumers, and Warner Bros. executives, are suspicious of Ellison and his billions of kinfolk. Netflix has made a reasonable case that it wants to make movies. Paramount mostly wants its own Batman characters.