In a takeover of Warner Bros., Netflix makes a play for 21st century Hollywood's throne

Hollywood is in a brave new world

Hollywood is in a brave new world.

Netflix’s plan to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business in an $82.7 billion deal would dramatically reshape the entertainment industry — and put a resounding exclamation point on Silicon Valley’s takeover of Tinseltown.

Twenty years ago, Netflix was a mail-order DVD rental service known for red envelopes. Warner Bros. was a crown jewel of American entertainment, famed for its studio lot water tower and revered for a cinematic heritage that stretched back to the early 1920s. Netflix was the scrappy interloper. Warner Bros. was a titan of the traditional media establishment.

Flash forward to the present: Netflix is the undisputed champion of entertainment, a streaming behemoth that reaches more than 300 million paid subscribers. Warner Bros. is still a hitmaker — “Barbie” and “Sinners” conquered the box office — but the studio is grappling with a brutal economic reality: shaky theatrical revenues, fierce competition from YouTube and TikTok, and rapidly changing audience habits.

If the deal is approved by Trump administration regulators, the merger of Netflix and Warner Bros. would create a production and distribution colossus, ushering in a head-spinning new era for Hollywood. It’s a business that used to rely primarily on ticket sales at brick-and-mortar cineplexes and home video sales. Today, it increasingly revolves around algorithms, apps and complex subscriber metrics.