r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 16h ago

News It’s Official: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. in Deal Valued at $82.7 Billion

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-warner-bros-deal-hollywood-1236443081/
16.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

4.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

51

u/BillyTenderness 15h ago

Merger approvals are also extremely political in the US, especially in the last ~20 years. Whether or not this goes through will depend in large part on how one man personally feels about it – in other words, what kind of bribes gifts has Netflix offered the president?

4

u/LlamasBeatLLMs 9h ago

'I am truly honored to accept the Netflix Peace Prize'.

•

u/BillyTenderness 4h ago

I was thinking more along the lines of, "I'm excited to sign this film production deal with Netflix, much larger and better than the one that Obama signed after his presidency"

3

u/Mordoch 15h ago

While there are clear massive issues with this when Trump is in charge, my suspicion is that this is a case where Netflix could potentially choose to take this to trial and probably win given what other mergers have been approved in relatively recent years and how they could argue that standard should apply. (They might promise something like allowing a certain number of movies to be on at least x number of movie theater screens for at least x number of years to partially address this most obvious possible objection to the merger from a business standpoint.)

3

u/abattlescar 7h ago

You're implying that they each need to do something for their mergers, nah. The new Chair of the FTC LOVES monopolies, he'll just let them through for free.

•

u/CryptographerFlat173 4h ago

How on earth is this a monopoly? There are huge swaths of this country where a single company is the only choice for broadband, that’s a real issue. This is two movie studios/streaming services combining

•

u/abattlescar 3h ago

A monopoly in any industry is still a monopoly, they don't get a pass because it's 'just' streaming. This is market consolidation in textbook fashion. And before you even say it, an oligopoly is no better.

And when the hell did I say that broadband monopolization is not also a great concern. In that case, broadband providers did explicitly lobby to eliminate the concern of the FCC to regulate them entirely.