Ever since Disney got the green light to acquire Fox, every company has decided they’d like to do the same thing. What was once something that should not have happened frankly and benefited no one except to allow people to say “[x IP] good again!” and “Wolverine can fight the Hulk!” it is now part of the scale of our day as factions keep trying to find each other and turn themselves into empires.
Warner Bros. is the latest company under threat of acquisition, while Netflix and Paramount are both trying to become the next owner of Batman. Game of Thrones. At first, it seemed like Netflix would easily bring another addition to its (mostly) anti-theatrical stable, but Paramount (which merged with Skydance last year) won’t have it. Current CEO David Ellison has cried, cried under, and recently filed a lawsuit as a way to block the deal that WB shareholders have already approved. At the time of writing, the judge ruled that Transformers the studio “has not been identified [or suffered] “any foreseeable, irreparable harm” from the upcoming deal so he can’t rush the deal as WB continues to finalize its deal with Netflix.
For those not keeping track at home, Ellison has tried at least a dozen times now (again, at the time of writing) to convince Warner Bros.’ shareholders to let Paramount be the acquirer. And each time, those shareholders tell him bluntly that their eyes are on Netflix and his offers are wrong. Whether that’s the real reason or there’s a beef left over from last year’s fight South Park broadcasting rights, finding the WB has become Ellison’s white whale, his hill to die on in hopes of gaining total control of middle America in entertainment and news.
Ellison is clearly not above using his family connections and promoting corporate interest to get the deals he wants—which has become a cause for concern about how Paramount has been doing; it is understandable that there are corners of Hollywood who fear that the same thing will happen with his longing for WB. In addition to unrestricted access to hundreds of IPs, new and old, he wants CNN as a way to make himself look useful to the US president Trump and twist another outlet to take the news out of the ship of self-flagellation and pleasure.
In a fairer, better world, Warner Bros. would take a look at its filmmaking success in 2025 and declare itself unmarketable, in fact. After five years of being shuffled around by different parent companies and rebranding 80 times, it could use the back half of the 2020s to use that momentum to get back to what it does best. There is no good reason for Paramount or Netflix to own it; monopolies are bad, corporate meddling is bad, and like most studios, WB was at its best when it got out of its own way.
Instead, we are all forced to watch a man with more money than he needs and who owns one of Hollywood’s biggest studios fail to repeat his “success”. All this is a lot of things at the same time: it is predictable (and scary) that Ellison is looking to make a mark on the world by buying as much of the entertainment industry as possible, just as it is very interesting that he was able to light CBS news and 60 Minutes but he cannot close the deal here. Was this a running gag for a TV season like Studio or 30 Rock, it might be fun to watch him get beat down every time he goes to WB shareholders.
But this is not a TV show; it’s real life, and it’s just dumb that all of this is happening. Corporate acquisitions have always been bad, and since the Disney-Fox merger, they’ve become a spectacle for themselves, from announcing that negotiations were in place to the eye-popping celebration video when the deal was completed. Right now, we know that there is no real “magic” that can come out of this, just layoffs and exhaustion. Whoever ends up getting Warner Bros., Paramount’s dogged pursuit of the studio makes all of this more troubling than usual—and unfortunately, it’s likely to encourage other agencies to not take too many “no’s” for an answer.
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