We’ve seen major corporate mergers in Hollywood over the past decade. For example, 20th Century Fox was bought by Disney, Paramount just merged with Skydance, and now reports are coming that studios are interested in Warner Bros. Now these reports just got an additional confirmation that tech companies are eager to buy Hollywood movie studios in an ever-changing future for the industry.
As mentioned, Warner Bros. is at the center of most of these current rumors, having recently been led into a merger with Discovery by CEO David Zaslav. While Zaslav also just separated Warner Bros’ film assets yet again, we could still see the studio sold off, with reports pointing to mergers with Paramount Skydance or even a buyout by Netflix.
FX chairman John Landgraf has commented on the matter with Deadline, and he’s adamant that these mergers are actually “inevitable” rather than something to speculate. Here’s what Landgraf shared during his appearance at the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention:
“We have an industry that, from a structural standpoint, requires some consolidation. We can’t have as many streaming services, certainly not global streaming services, and some of the great legacy majors in the United States don’t really have enough scale.
“I think that’s why you see — between Paramount, Universal, and Warner Brothers — a desire to consolidate at least two of those companies to try to create another distributor that has a scale globally.”
Landgraf further discussed his feelings of inevitability, pointing out that companies will need to consolidate just to acquire more subscribers than they already have globally:
“I really honestly think it’s inevitable. If you look at the balance sheet for half of these companies independently, they really don’t have any way of scaling to 200, 250, 300 million global subscribers without some kind of consolidation.”
He also acknowledged how such mergers will be “really hard for the creative community, because essentially, there’ll be one less buyer” and “consolidation means greater efficiency.”
As such, we’ll have to see what the future holds. With major corporations on the rise and the biggest movie studios of Hollywood being bought out, however, it will definitely be a strange new world for the film production and distribution world.