The New Yorker:

The competition between Netflix and Paramount Skydance to acquire the studio is haunted by the ghosts of mergers past.

By Richard Brody

The film-industry panic sparked by the news of Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. has been immediate and intense, and in the days immediately after, it was hard to find anyone not named David Zaslav (the head of the studio’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery) who was happy about the prospect. The C.E.O. of the movie-theatre trade group Cinema United called the deal “an unprecedented threat” and the Writers Guild said, “This merger must be blocked.” And the ranks of its opponents included not just antitrust guards, such as Elizabeth Warren, but also one of the industry’s biggest and newest tycoons, David Ellison, whose company, Skydance Media, acquired Paramount (and, with it, CBS) earlier this year, to become Paramount Skydance. He’d been trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, in its entirety, for months and has launched a hostile-takeover bid.

The proposed merger is only the latest of many takeovers, ranging from propitious to preposterous, that have marked the film business for more than half a century, with movie studios traded from hand to hand like baseball cards. The studio now called Sony was originally Columbia Pictures, founded in 1924, which Coca-Cola bought in 1982 and sold, seven years later, to the Japanese electronics titan. M-G-M was purchased by the financier Kirk Kerkorian in 1969, and in the nineteen-eighties he passed it, or parts of it, back and forth with the media mogul Ted Turner like a hot potato, until it landed with Sony, in 2005. Today, it’s owned by a subsidiary of Amazon. As for Warner Bros., it merged in 1990 with Time Inc., and, in 2001, the new entity was at the center of a deal that has been called “the worst in history”: AOL’s merger with Time Warner. In 2014, Rupert Murdoch failed in a bid for Time Warner; then A. T. & T. acquired it, in 2018, and the media company has been in its present form since only 2022, when Warner Media, formerly owned by A. T. & T., merged with Discovery, Inc.

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