Warner Bros. Discovery: Everything must go
What’s the entire back catalogue of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the DC Universe, and the TV Show Friends worth? According to Netflix, eighty-two point seven billion dollars. At least that was the offer they made to buy out Warner Bros. Discovery. The offer combines a cool seventy billion in cash, and buying up all of Warner Bros.’ debt, in exchange for a treasure trove of franchises and classic films, which would give Netflix rich in the one commodity it has coveted since its humble origins as a DVD rental service: intellectual property.
The show-stopping culmination of a heated bidding war between Netflix and Paramount Skydance, another American media conglomerate, this eye-watering figure raised alarm bells in Europe as well as the United States. The Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union sets out antitrust rules which are policies designed to prevent individual corporations from becoming too powerful in the market. (Specificaly Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty.). That’s why Netflix and Warner Bros Discovery had to submit special filings to competition authorities in the European Commission as well as the US to get the merger authorised, while Paramount met with DG COMP, as well as European politicians, in the hopes of getting their offer greenlit faster.
Antitrust law generally exists to protect consumers like you and me. For instance, if one company holds a monopoly over a certain product, we might have to pay unfairly high prices for a product just because there are no other companies left to sell that product to us. But what about the people making that product?
Who’s losing out with a buyout?
Big firms like Netflix and Paramount are studios, which produce and fund original content, but primarily they’re distributors. They make money through leasing (or buying, as in this case) existing films and TV shows which we pay monthly fees to watch as often as we like, but only on their respective platforms. Smaller studios will approach Netflix and sell them their films; directors hope for a bid from a streaming service in order to fund their film in exchange for distribution rights. They are the biggest fish in a massive, diverse ecosystem – and this merger means one of the biggest fish is getting bigger.
With less buyers, there will be less competition on the buyer-end, which could mean that writers, actors, directors, and every worker in the film industry will have to sell their products – be that a new TV pilot, a film script, or their acting services – for less and less money.
This merger also been criticised for the threat it poses to the traditional way we interact with film: cinemas themselves.
The COVID-19 pandemic was destructive across the arts, but cinemas fared particularly poorly, with over 9000 cinemas forced to shut down across the European Union, stocks in cinema chains in freefall, and billions of potential revenue lost over the year of 2020. Lockdowns forcing film productions to be delayed, postponed, and cancelled had a devastating domino effect on the ecosystem of small-to-medium enterprises and freelancers that makes up a massive majority of the European film industry.
The International Union of Cinemas [UNIC], which represents cinema exhibitors across Europe, voiced its “strong opposition” to the buyout in December. “Netflix has released only a handful of titles in cinemas, usually to chase awards, and only for a very short period”, their official statement said. They allege that this means cinema operators are being denied a “fair window of exclusivity”.
Netflix’s business model doesn’t care exactly what you’re watching on their platform, as long as you watch a lot of it. In recent years, they’ve bought films from festivals (which means acquiring the distribution rights to films once they’ve already been made). A traditional distributor would then essentially lend out the film’s screening rights to cinemas for a few months. However, for a streaming giant like Netflix, it’s not in their interest to keep any of their films in the cinema – thereby forcing their clients up off the couch – for too long. That’s how we end up with films like Train Dreams – a period drama and four-time Oscar nominee this year – sent to a limited number of cinemas for only two weeks before also becoming available for streaming on Netflix.
For cinemas, whose continued survival relies on making back licensing fees and turning a profit through concessions, this is a massive blow. In a world where convenience rules all, can cinema as an experience survive?
The fight for independent art
In the face of these threats, it’s worth noting that cinema hasn’t been so exciting, so diverse, or so original for a very long time. In this years’ Oscar race, writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Sinners has been a surprise smash, with sixteen nominations, once seen as unthinkable for any film dubbed “horror”; Bugonia and Marty Supreme are triumphs of originality; an adaptation of a 1990 Pynchon novel is pipped for Best Picture.
We only need to look at the “Best International Feature Film” nominees from this years’ Oscars to see another trend that inspires hope: how many of these films transcend national borders. It Was Just An Accident is a gut-wrenching co-production between Iran, France, and Luxembourg; the touching family drama Sentimental Value was set in Oslo by its Danish-Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier. The surprise recognition of Sirāt was another delight, celebrating the efforts of a French-born Spanish director, set in Morocco, and funded by the Spanish Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts. The European film sector is getting bigger, exporting more, and increasingly embarking on ambitious international projects. The Together Fund, which launched in 2024, has offered tens of millions of dollars (USD) in equity funding for European independent film and TV production companies, triggering a flurry of excitement and ambition in the region.
Meanwhile, cinemas themselves have been fighting back too. In 2023 and 2024, it looked like the sector had finally recovered from its lengthy post-Covid hangover: in 2023 the United Kingdom saw large-scale film releases creep back up to pre-Covid levels, with Barbenheimer being a particular highlight that brought people back in to cinema seats. Meanwhile the Council of Europe found that film admissions across Europe went up 24% between 2023 and 2024, and continued to grow through 2025. Despite the prevailing doomeristic narrative around Gen-Z’s phone addiction, young people are a big part of that growth. North American statistics show that the frequency of Gen-Z going to the cinema went up 25% in 2025. We’re still far from a full recovery, though: box office annual revenues world-wide are stilll hundreds of millions below what they were in 2019. In this delicate state, this buyout – which boosts the power of one single streaming giant exponentially – could deliver a near-fatal blow.
Time to get off the couch: how you can help
If you want to be a part of that fight, there’s no shortage of opportunities to support cinemas and independent film, and no better time than the present. You can find independent cinemas near you using the European Arthouse Cinema Day directory, and watch films there instead of larger chains, and look into Cineuropa’s festival reports to find film festivals upcoming in your city or region. National Film Institutes or cinematheques often offer specific discounted concessions, events and even specialist training courses for young people and students who are interested in film. Thanks to box office reports and cinemas’ concession-based sales model, there are few creative sectors where numbers matter more than the movies. One more occupied seat, one more ticket, even one more box of popcorn can make a massive difference.