What began with a siege ended with a signature. The war is over and perhaps — as history will tell our children — the wrong side may have won. One can only pray that it hasn’t.

On February 27, 2026, Warner Bros Discovery accepted Paramount Skydance’s revised bid to buy it out at $31 per share — a $110 billion deal — ending a bitter, months-long battle between two would-be buyers. Netflix walked. Paramount, marshalled by the collective might of Skydance and Oracle, won. Hollywood, already unsteady, now braces for an era of corporate decisions.

Like all corporate takeovers of creative fields, this is not a welcoming restructure. The decision will determine what gets made, what gets seen, where it gets seen, and whether cinema as a cultural experience survives these verdicts.

Once more into the breach

This is not Warner Bros’ first time in a corporate ring. The studio has been sold, merged and absorbed so often that its shareholders and employees have coined a phrase for their condition: “merger fatigue.”

It all began in 1923, when Warner Bros Pictures was founded by four brothers: Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack L. Warner. By 1966, only Jack remained and, that year, his controlling interests were acquired by Seven Arts Productions for $32 million, resulting in a 43-year-old Hollywood institution becoming a new corporate entity called Warner Bros-Seven Arts.

It’s now official that Warner Bros Discovery will be sold to its rival media behemoth Paramount Skydance. Hollywood has survived wars, depressions, television, home video, piracy and streaming. It may survive this age of corporate takeovers as well. But survival is not the same as vitality. That is the quiet tragedy

Three years later, in 1969, Kinney National Company purchased the company, renaming it Warner Bros Inc, and then Warner Communications Inc in 1972. In 1989, Time Inc merged with Warner Communications to form Time Warner.

Between 2001 and 2003, the internet giant America Online (AOL) and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner. The company reverted to its Time Warner moniker until AT&T’s acquisition in 2018, who then rebranded it WarnerMedia.

In 2022, Discovery’s David Zaslav led the merger of WarnerMedia with his company Discovery Inc to form Warner Bros Discovery (WBD). In the age of dominating mega-corps and streaming, the company had one intention: to become a super-conglomerate that could take down Disney’s growing empire of acquisitions.

The latest upheaval took place last September, when David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, made an unsolicited offer for WBD. Zaslav, caught off-guard and under investor pressure, was forced into an auction earlier than planned.

Netflix, which had been courting WBD’s studio and streaming assets for months, entered a formal agreement in December 2025 at $27.75 per share. However, the streaming giant did so only for the studio and streaming operations, not its cable channels.

Paramount, pushing for the entire WBD, kept raising its offer. Its ninth bid, sweetened to $31 per share, with a “ticking fee” for regulatory delays, was an offer Zaslav could not refuse, no matter how much he may have wanted to. It is no secret that Netflix had been a clear favourite of WBD executives since the early days of the affair.

Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters bowed out on day one of a four-day matching window last week, when Paramount made its final offer. “This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” Netflix’s official statement said.

The empire strikes back

The history of corporate consolidation in Hollywood dates to 1916, when Adolph Zukor merged his Famous Players Film Company with the Jesse L. Lasky Company to form the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Even then, Paramount, established by Zukor in 1912, entered the deal as the new corporation’s distribution arm.

The merger accelerated the studio era. However, back in the golden age, creativity and innovation thrived and propelled the industry. That is no longer the case.

Amazon’s 2022 acquisition of MGM added James Bond, Rocky and The Silence of the Lambs to Prime Video’s catalogue at $8.5 billion. The library thickened, but new films carrying the MGM logo remained few and far between. Like most acquisitions in this money-driven, plutocratic age, this one was about ownership of the past, not an investment in the future.

No company has weaponised acquisition more effectively — or more destructively — than Disney. Pixar in 2006. Marvel in 2009. Lucasfilm in 2012. 20th Century Fox and Hulu in 2019. Disney bought creative universes and business potentials, not just studios — and therein lies the woe.

20th Century Studios (formerly Fox) — a major studio with a 90-year history — now operates as a diminished production label. With its identity dissolved into its parent company, the studio’s annual output contracted sharply from 11 films in 2018 to just four last year.

From this year, Hulu is fully folded into the Disney+ ecosystem. Until recently, it had been the biggest producer of original content after Netflix. Since the acquisition, its slate of original movies and series has dwindled from 53 titles in 2022 to 28 in 2025. Disney has also curbed its own originals output, from 48 to 20.

The math, one assumes, makes sense in the accounting books: 20 from Disney and 28 from Hulu adds up to 48 titles in a single app. With its standalone platform eliminated, Hulu now lives within the Disney+ app as a ‘tile’, like Marvel. The Paramount-WBD deal replicates this blueprint.

20th Century Studios (formerly Fox) — a major studio with a 90-year history — now operates as a diminished production label. With its identity dissolved into its parent company, the studio’s annual output contracted sharply from 11 films in 2018 to just four last year. Until recently, Hulu had been the biggest producer of original content after Netflix. Since the acquisition, its slate of original movies and series has dwindled from 53 titles in 2022 to 28 in 2025. Disney has also curbed its own originals output, from 48 to 20.

Raiders of the lost archive

So, here’s the bigger question: what does any merger actually acquire?

By now, the answer is obvious: the library.

The practice is as old as Hollywood itself. Back catalogues are steady, low-cost income streams that provide leverage in licensing and streaming negotiations. Warner Bros alone holds DC and Cartoon Network — ie Batman, Superman, The Flash, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, The Sopranos and Looney Tunes. For corporations, these are financial instruments, not beloved properties.

The problem is that library ownership and cinema vitality are often at odds. When a studio can monetise Beetlejuice on streaming for the 15th year running, the urgency to develop new titles diminishes. Libraries preserve the past at the expense of the present. The other risk — and a very real one at that — is that studios under financial pressure use catalogues as tax write-offs rather than assets.

WBD was heavily criticised in 2022 and 2023 for removing completed or near-finished projects from HBO Max to claim tax benefits. The eliminations included the near-finished Batgirl, much to the vocal chagrin of its directors. With the combined Paramount-WBD carrying over $78 billion in debt — and a mandate to reduce that ratio quickly — the risk of deleting films, for good, looms larger than ever.

The merger of the Titans

Ellison has promised 30 theatrical films a year from the combined studios. That’s 15 releases per studio. He also reaffirmed a 45-day theatrical window and declared that “movies should be seen in theatres.” It is a bold promise — one that may calm cinema owners. It may also be unrealistic.

With Superman and A Minecraft Movie, WBD reached four billion dollars globally last year. Yet, despite being on a box office roll, the studio only released 11 films in cinemas. Paramount, meanwhile, managed eight.

Consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research put it plainly to Variety in a February 27 article: “In a single year, there are simply not more than 15 broad-appeal stories a studio can develop, produce, market and distribute effectively. Thirty wide releases are extremely unrealistic.”

Sony and Lionsgate — neither a merger of titan corporations — continue to release more films annually than any single legacy studio. Their independence helps them get 14 and 18 films, respectively, into cinemas.

The Manchurian candidate

Behind the scenes, a higher power may be pulling the strings. The patterns, evident in multiple reports, are worth examining. Some have already become headlines in The Washington Post, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Bloomberg.

It is no secret that David Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union as a guest of Senator Lindsey Graham, or that his father who, as mentioned earlier, is Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is a major backer of pro-Israel causes. At a 2017 fundraising gala for ‘Friends of the Israel Defence Forces’, the elder Ellison referred to Israel as “my country” and he is the personal guarantor of the WBD transaction.

The sirens continue to blare.

Last year, Paramount was the first major studio to publicly condemn a Hollywood boycott of Israeli film institutions. Soon after, reports circulated of a “blacklist” targeting Hollywood figures who expressed solidarity with Palestinians. Paramount+ has since acquired rights to an Israeli-produced drama about the October 7 attacks.

On the news front, Bari Weiss remains a subject of hot debate. Weiss, a conservative columnist, is the founder of the media company The Free Press, which Paramount purchased for $150 million. Since CBS’ acquisition by Paramount, she has been installed as editor-in-chief of CBS News. According to sceptics, Weiss lacks the relevant experience for the post.

With Anderson Cooper’s exit from 60 Minutes, a yearly viewership decline of 10 percent, and staffers alleging pressure to conform to a preconceived ideological slant under Weiss, the network is in turmoil.

The editorial drift that shook CBS News now looms over one of the world’s most important news networks: CNN. CNN is owned by Warner Bros Discovery and will now be sold to Paramount Skydance. According to Variety’s February 27 report, CNN staff are “devastated” by the deal.

CNN, which once generated one billion dollars in annual profits under Jeff Zucker, now projects $600 million. Its recovery plan rests entirely on a new subscription service, CNN All Access. That plan assumes that CNN delivers credible, trusted news.

According to Variety, analyst Blair Levin warned investors that, because of Paramount, CBS News’ entire media ecosystem is vulnerable to government pressure. In today’s political climate, that pressure is unlikely to favour editorial independence.

One platform to rule them all?

Paramount has announced plans to merge HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming platform, once the deal closes. This, of course, was inevitable.

Ellison has promised that HBO will operate with independence. He also stressed that Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content, and his team will work without heavy corporate oversight, and that HBO will continue as a brand. For reference: Disney said the same about Hulu.

The combined platform would give Paramount over 200 million direct-to-consumer subscribers, bringing it closer to Netflix’s 300 million.

For audiences outside the US, the Netflix deal may have been the better outcome. Consider Pakistan: HBO Max has only recently launched here, and Paramount+ has no confirmed launch date. Merging the WBD catalogue into Netflix would have given subscribers direct access to all of WBD’s brands, and decades of theatrical releases under a single subscription. For HBO, the only casualty under Netflix would have been the app, not the creative operation itself.

However, there was a legitimate concern when it came to theatrical releases. Netflix’s theatrical record has been inconsistent at best, with a few titles receiving only a seven-day Oscar-qualifying run. Coupled with Sarandos’ earlier dismissal of cinemas as “outdated”, one could imagine Superman flying only inside the Netflix app as an exclusive, if the deal had happened. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine why Netflix — or any studio — would kill a consistently profitable theatrical operation.

As it’s panned out, it is not a total loss for Netflix. The company walks away with a $2.8 billion break-up fee from WBD. That capital will likely flow directly into their original content pipeline. Analytically speaking, in losing the bid, Netflix gained the means to remain the world’s dominant content creator, without the burden of being $78 billion in debt.

The big picture

At the end of the day, in any outcome — whether Paramount or Netflix acquired Warner Bros — the collective medium of entertainment shrinks. Hollywood has survived wars, depressions, television, home videos, piracy and streaming. It may survive this age of corporate takeovers as well. But survival is not the same as vitality. That is the quiet tragedy.

If Hollywood measures its future through consolidation alone, it mistakes scale for strength — and strength comes from competition. For any industry to grow, it needs healthy rivalry, not subsidiaries.

Where once 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, Columbia/TriStar, Disney, DreamWorks, MGM, Universal, New Line Cinema, Miramax and Touchstone stood, now stand just five studios. Most are shells of their former selves, quietly fuelling the streaming age as cogs in a larger machine — a part of a library to be owned and discarded without remorse.

The real question is not who owns the libraries — it is whether the stories inside them still matter enough to make audiences leave the house. If the industry forgets that — if it focuses only on the smaller screen glowing in one’s hand and monthly subscriptions — the war may already be over.

The writer is Icon’s primary film reviewer

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 8th, 2026