When the credits finally rolled on the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war this week, it wasn’t the world’s largest streamer standing on the lot. It was Paramount Skydance, another legacy Hollywood studio with a subscale streaming business struggling under a massive debt load.
Netflix formally withdrew its bid on Thursday after Warner’s board deemed Paramount’s latest offer “superior,” ending months of brinksmanship that played out as a throwback, even a sequel of sorts, to the great takeover battles of the 1980s and ’90s, many of them involving Warner and Paramount. Like so many of those battles of yore, particularly Barry Diller losing out to Sumner Redstone in the contest to acquire Paramount in 1994, this becomes yet another “what if” in a Hollywood history littered with them.
Three major questions about the future of the entertainment sector would have been settled in one fashion or another in the event of a successful Netflix bid, but now we’ll always be asking: what if? Here are the questions about the future of Hollywood that remain unresolved.
1. The theatrical windowing question, or getting people to go to the movies
From the start, the Netflix bid was a test of whether the company that had trained consumers to “binge-watch” or “Netflix and chill,” consuming mass quantities of content from the comfort of their couches, could tolerate old‑school theatrical discipline. Buying Warner Bros. didn’t just mean owning DC Comics, Harry Potter, and HBO. It meant inheriting a global distribution machine, multiplex relationships, and a release ecosystem still built around a roughly 45‑day exclusive theatrical window for major films.
