Opinion No matter who wins the Warner Bros battle, the ultimate loser is the audience
For cinephiles, the challenge remains unchanged: Fighting to preserve wonder in an ecosystem that increasingly values convenience over curiosity, and metrics over magic
Warner Bros rejected Paramount's latest hostile takeover bid on Tuesday but gave the rival studio until the end of Monday to submit a “best and final” offer. (file photo) If you’re a cinema enthusiast in 2025, you don’t just have to keep abreast of the most impactful filmmakers, actors, and technicians. You also have to be well informed about the suits who run the major studios. People like Ted Sarandos, David Ellison and David Zaslav will probably impact the quality, nature and medium of the cinema you watch more than a Steven Spielberg, a Martin Scorsese or an Anurag Kashyap. At the time of writing this article, streaming giant Netflix is a whisker away from acquiring the legendary Warner Brothers’ film and TV studios as well as its streaming assets (including HBO Max) and their entire catalogue of iconic franchises for a whopping $72 billion. There has been some kerfuffle with Paramount Pictures putting in a last-minute bid to play spoilsport, but if that scenario goes through, then Warner Bros will come under Ellison. He is pally with US President Donald Trump, who has on more than one occasion shown he’s willing to be ruthless to those in Hollywood who don’t do his bidding.
Looks like the studio responsible for The Matrix will suffer no matter which of the two “pills” it’s forced to choose. Regardless of the outcome, it seems the pursuit of good cinema for cinephiles isn’t about to get any easier.
Streaming platforms like Netflix came to our shores roughly a decade ago with the promise of providing a platform for bold, exciting and cutting-edge programming. After the rattle of the early years, that promise fell apart with a thud. Owing to pressures from the powers that be and a fairly conservative family audience, they realised in many spaces, the subject matter had to be reigned in. Add to this, instances of straight-up censorship. The same platforms that were patting themselves abroad for making pathbreaking stories on their platform decided to budge and bow down in our part of the world.
An adaptation of Maximum City, the best-selling book by Suketu Mehta, was shelved, and director Dibakar Banerjee’s film Tees, which was conceived as a Netflix original, remains unreleased.
The last straw was what journalist Cory Doctorow called “enshittification” — to describe how online platforms degrade user experience to favour business customers and themselves, becoming progressively worse over time. The glitzy ad-free high-definition platforms were now increasing their prices or relegating their audiences to tiers where they’d be forced to sit through advertisements.
For Platforms like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon, looking upon the past is seldom a priority. To them, what matters is how the past can be improved upon so that the memories of an “inferior” version can be forgotten. Their focus is what makes them trendy, what will make a new generation flock towards them. That’s why a studio like Warner Bros with a storied history and rich legacy might struggle to thrive in the Netflix domain. Amongst the thousands of Netflix titles right now, there are merely a handful that are from the 1950s, 60s, or 70s. Will the platform be able to do justice to the studio that gave us Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and Singin’ in the Rain? Or will we have to brace ourselves for the inevitable Stranger Things and Batman crossover?
Netflix wants to kill the theatre business. This is the studio that barely gives theatrical runs to Frankenstein — a visually exciting film from Oscar winner Guilermo Del Toro, or the Knives Out sequels. A horizontal notification bar on your phone screen informing you that a brand new film has arrived in your streaming library does not hold a candle to the excitement of being seated in a dark theatre with strangers, ready to be taken on a journey.
In the end, the fate of Warner Bros and the future of movies feels caught in the same storm: Tech ambition clashing with cinematic tradition. Whether Netflix wins or Paramount swoops in, the tug-of-war between legacy and algorithmic efficiency will shape what we’re allowed to watch. For cinephiles, the challenge remains unchanged: Fighting to preserve wonder in an ecosystem that increasingly values convenience over curiosity, and metrics over magic.
The writer is a podcast producer and stand-up comedian
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