Why are all the studios trying to eat (buy) each other?!
This may seem very “old man yells at cloud” of me but why are all the studios trying to make bids for each other? What if we didn’t have one big studio in charge of all of our art?
We used to have a lot of studios in the world. Fox was then bought by Disney and that merged into a larger company. Not to mention the purchase of Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm. Those though are a bit different since they’re production companies and not the studio itself but alas, still a lot of art under one studio’s umbrella. And people, rightfully, had things to say about the Mouse.
So why are we now living in a world where all the studios are trying to rinse, wash, and repeat what Disney did? We have Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to obviously not have the “Discovery” part attached to it. Paramount and Skydance are one company. And now, after a sale of WBD to Paramount/Skydance was a non-starter, Netflix wants to throw a bid in.
According to Deadline, Netflix is looking into the possibility thanks to a source. But in the past Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters denied merger rumors. “You have to do that by the hard work of developing those capabilities in the trenches day to day. You don’t get there simply by buying another company that is also still developing those same capabilities,” he said.
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos also said that they had always had “no interest in owning legacy media networks, so there is no change there.” So if something suddenly changed….that’s interesting but I hope that we stop doing this nonsense. Why can’t the studios all exist on their own and let art not be a monolith under one umbrella?
We don’t know if WBD will ever merge with another studio but for now, let’s keep them all separate?
(featured image: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
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