Netflix Considering Bid to Acquire Warner Bros

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Last week, Paramount tossed a big bucket of chum in the water surrounding its fellow “major” Hollywood studio Warner Bros., announcing that it was assembling a majority cash bid to buy out David Zaslav’s Big Ol’ House O’ Tax Write-Offs. (Backed by the very deep pockets of Skydance’s David Ellison, who just got done basically doing the exact same thing to Paramount itself.) Now the sharks are starting to circle in earnest, as Hollywood business analysts have begun suggesting that other big movie-making brands might try to take a stab at gobbling down Warner Bros. Discovery first. That includes, somewhat bizarrely, Netflix, which is apparently running the numbers on whether it can swallow the HBO-owning giant before anyone else can gobble it up.

This is per Puck‘s Dylan Byers, quoting “a well-placed Hollywood source” suggesting that the streamer might try to put together a bid of its own for a Warner Bros. acquisition. Byers’ analysis suggests that this is mostly Ellison’s fault: Paramount’s bid rumors have solidified the idea that one of the big studios is going to have to merge with somebody in the near future—something also recently floated by Disney-Fox merger survivor John Landgraf of FX—so all of the major players (including a relative newcomer like Netflix, which is always heavy with cash and hungry for prestige and new brands to exploit) are looking at their balance sheets to see who can shell out for a lightly used entertainment conglomerate.

As people who get extremely nervous at the concept of ever-constricting media consolidation—especially as it becomes clearer and clearer that these kinds of mergers make the resulting bowls of studio gumbo even bigger targets for governmental pressure—there is a very mild silver lining to the idea of Netflix entering this particular fray. I.e., that the streamer probably lacks both the cash, and the interest, to eat all of WBD, a vast labyrinth of interconnected interests that also include games, comics, and a bunch of other properties that are not “things that sell Netflix subscriptions.” So—in contrast to Paramount and Ellison, who reportedly want the whole buffet—a Netflix acquisition would presumably involve some of Warner’s assets being divided up into separate companies, limiting how much stuff all gets shoved together under one roof. (Maybe “silver lining” is too strong a phrasing here. “Bit of the lining with slightly less human shit on it” isn’t quite as poetic, but might be more apt.)

All of this is, of course, highly speculative; nobody’s publicly thrown any money at anybody yet. But Paramount’s murmurings have definitely set something in motion, as various leviathans, both ancient and freshly crafted, move in the murky waters, waiting to see which will devour which.

[via ScreenRant]

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