When news of the potential sale of Warner Bros. studios and streaming to Netflix, it is fair to say there was some noise in Hollywood. Everyone from the exhibitors to the Teamsters reacted with fury. The noise is not dying down, and more people are chiming in.
Jason Kilar was the CEO of WarnerMedia just as the pandemic hit, and it was he who switched the Warner Bros. release schedule to PVOD at the same time as cinemas, including big movies like Wonder Woman 1984 and Godzilla vs Kong. It caused all sorts of fallout, including Christopher Nolan walking away from Warners.
Kilar was out after Discovery closed the deal for Warner Bros. to create WBD, and David Zaslav was installed.
Now, Kilar has spoken out on the Netflix deal, saying he is not a fan of the deal. In a post on X, he said:
“If I was tasked with doing so, I could not think of a more effective way to reduce competition in Hollywood than selling WBD to Netflix. When I use the phrase competition in Hollywood, I am referring to having a sufficient number of vibrant and robust entities that can and will aggressively compete against each other to produce and distribute films, series, live events and more for decades to come. I am not focused on the legacy of it all.”
Which is interesting, as it was probably Kilar’s move to streaming during COVID that fired the starting gun on audience expectation changes around release windows and the involvement of streaming in high-profile movie releases.
Meanwhile, the roar of Ellison disappointment will only grow louder now that it looks like President Donald Trump will not get involved to stop any deal with Netflix.
He was said to be a supporter of the Ellison-backed bid from Paramount Skydance, but when asked what he thought of the proposed deal with Netflix, he did not seem against it. As per The Hollywood Reporter, he said:
“Well, that’s gotta go through a process, and we’ll see what happens. Netflix is a great company. They’ve done a phenomenal job. Ted is a fantastic man. I have a lot of respect for him. But it’s a lot of market share, so we’ll have to see what happens.
They have a very big market share, and when they have Warner Bros., you know, that share goes up a lot. So I don’t know. That’s going to be for some economists to tell. … And I’ll be involved in that decision too, but they have a very big market share.”
David Ellison still believes that their bid is the only one with a clear path to regulatory approval after the work they did as part of the bid. So we wait and see what the FCC is going to do.
