Why the Warner Bros battle is about control, not content
Netflix and Paramount are battling to see which company will take over Warner Bros Discovery.
James Birt, associate professor of creative media and associate dean of external engagement at Bond University, sees a bigger battle at play: for control of Western culture.
James Birt - the author
The escalating contest for Warner Bros Discovery is being treated as a Hollywood drama, but the real story is not about personalities or red carpets. It is about who will own the machinery that decides what the world watches.
Netflix moved first with an agreement worth about AUD$108 billion for Warner’s entertainment assets. Paramount and Skydance then launched a larger hostile bid backed by Gulf sovereign wealth funds. The speed and size of these bids tell us the asset in play is bigger than a studio library. The fight is over control of the data, archives and technologies that will shape global storytelling for decades.
Warner Bros is valuable because of what it has built quietly across almost 100 years. Behind the familiar logos sits one of the most organised creative archives in the industry. Scripts, continuity notes, production logs, artwork and localisation records have been maintained with unusual consistency. Once this was administrative clutter. Now it is strategic infrastructure.
The issue is the battle between talent and distribution , with a subset being benign and un benign influence.
When the 7 sisters of Hollywood studios dominated both the theaters and the production, talent was largely controlled. The idea that talent is more controllable through distribution has died with digital distribution. Its simply not possible to herd all these cats. You can see in the length of introductory production/talent titles just after a 7 sisters of Hollywood motif (Warner, Disney Fox, MGM , UA, Columbia and Paramount),
Lastly the battle between Paramount and Netflix is battle between the remaining Israeli/Jewish influence in Hollywood and the USA tv networks. Paramount and now its new CBS news CEO, and the narrative that Hollywood releases a new Holocaust movie at least annually , compared with the internationally multicultural C suite make up of Netflix. This battle is even in the Paramount vehicle with Jared Kushner’s Affinity equity partners (initially) , versus the Arab investment groups in the Paramount bidding vehicle.
Its certainly something that I would not wish to happen, that dictatorship nations investment vehicles end up as major investors in Western media. .