Following the announcement that Netflix would buy the film and streaming businesses of Warner Bros for $72 billion, it has been difficult to find anyone who views this development as positive, with even Netflix investors displaying concern. Yet rampant speculation over what this might mean for consumers or even the art of cinema itself has risked overshadowing ominous portents for the workers who stand to lose the most — and what they might do in response. The entertainment industry may be brutal toward those it depends on, but it is particularly vulnerable to their power when they act together.
Predictably, much attention has been consumed by the hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s assets, launched by Paramount Skydance after its own attempt to acquire WBD was beaten out. Despite Paramount chief executive David Ellison arguing that his company would be more likely to gain the approval of federal competition regulators (and Ellison reportedly promising the White House to clownify CNN à la CBS under the Bari Weiss regime), a formal response from the WBD board this week advised shareholders to reject the offer, though Paramount may still return with a higher bid.
Regardless, a victory for either Netflix or Paramount would produce an industry-warping megacorporation that makes the word “monopoly” unavoidable. Whoever wins, we lose.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., warned on NPR’s Morning Edition that a Paramount–Warner Bros. merger could result in “one person who basically decides what movies are going to be made, what you’re going to see on your streaming service, and how much you’re going to have to pay for it.” Even President Donald Trump — not exactly renowned for his zeal for corporate propriety — commented that the combined size of Netflix and WBD “could be a problem.”
“The world’s largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent.”
The most vociferous condemnation of a Warner Bros. merger has come from those unions representing the industries that would be most affected by it. Responding to the Netflix deal, a joint statement from the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East was unequivocal: “The world’s largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent.
“The outcome would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers. … This merger must be stopped.”
In the fiscal year ending in December 2024, WBD had approximately 35,000 employees, while Netflix had 14,000 and Paramount 18,600 (though Paramount Skydance already began layoffs of 2,000 U.S. jobs in October). Many may share organized labor’s fears.
According to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, these fears are unfounded. “This deal is pro-consumer, pro-innovation, pro-worker, it’s pro-creator, it’s pro-growth” Sarandos claimed in a call with Wall Street analysts last week, presumably before explaining why bridge purchases are a hot investment, and later fabulating at a UBS conference that the merger would be “a great way to create and protect jobs in the entertainment industry.”
Notably unconvinced — and with good reason — is Lindsay Dougherty, the Jimmy Hoffa-tattooed director of the Teamsters Motion Picture Division, who told The Hollywood Reporter that “in any merger or acquisition we’ve seen in our history, it hasn’t been good for workers.”
This is a plain statement of fact: Corporate mergers are rarely marked by employees getting a pay rise and reassured job security, as evidenced by the dramatic mass layoffs that followed Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox and AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, the latter of which led to roughly 45,000 job losses across AT&T’s media and telecom divisions. Both of these examples also demonstrate that, whatever regulatory scrutiny a Warner Bros. deal may face, it is far from assured that present antitrust enforcement is enough to prevent one.
One of the great lies of America is that monopolies are the one form of capitalism the republic will not tolerate. In truth, most victories against the practice throughout American history have quickly been revealed as hollow. Two decades after the Supreme Court famously ruled that Standard Oil be dissolved under the Sherman Antitrust Act and split into 34 companies, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey remained the largest oil producer in the world and a perennial nemesis of the anti-monopoly populist Huey Long, easily capable of avoiding serious regulation thanks to its bottomless resources.
Writing in The Verge this week, Charles Pulliam-Moore observed that “issues like layoffs and price hikes are an inevitable consequence of consolidation” but it is important to remember that this is precisely the point of such consolidation. Monopolies are not naturally occurring; they are designed to maximize the outcomes desired by those who bring them into being.
With that in mind, the grim consequences of a Warner Bros. merger for entertainment workers should be understood as anything but accidental, particularly given the context of recent years. Instead, they should be seen as the latest manifestation of a sustained and regrettably successful push to immiserate and disempower the many thousands whose livelihoods depend upon those industries.
One of the defining issues behind the strike by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America that paralyzed Hollywood for much of 2023 was the threat of AI, the dark allure of which was not difficult to discern. The fact that within the entertainment industry, this technology has thus far produced only laughable slop has not killed off the dream in some quarters that it might eventually do away with the need for human creativity, along with the awkward need to pay human beings. This is arguably why, despite their grudging acceptance of some safeguards and restrictions in order to bring the 2023 strikes to an end, Hollywood bosses refused to countenance prohibiting AI entirely. Along with the rest of the corporatocracy, the anti-worker potential they see in it is too great to resist.
The anti-worker potential they see in AI is too great to resist.
Many of those concerned by what a Warner Bros. merger could do to the industry will be all too aware of its current unenviable state. There is a bleak irony in Netflix’s attempt to seize one of Hollywood’s oldest and most famous studios, as unemployment and precarity have exploded among entertainment workers thanks to a devastating labor contraction caused in large part by the streaming industry pulling back from Hollywood; August 2024 saw unemployment in film and TV reach 12.5 percent, triple the national unemployment rate. Meanwhile, those VFX workers lucky enough to be employed — and upon whom so many of the industry’s biggest shows and movies depend — regularly face impossible workloads and sweatshop-like conditions.
The goal of keeping workers hungry and desperate is as old as capitalism itself, and the goal of any monopoly is to create an entity so vast and powerful it can set the terms for the entire industry, leaving consumers with no other option, workers with no choice but to reckon with it, and unions helpless to defend them.
Contrary to what Sarandos and his peers would like you to believe, those in a position to play Monopoly with billions of actual dollars are not and have never been aligned with the interests of workers; the question of the hour is what can be done to protect them.
In the opinion of Variety’s senior media writer Gene Maddaus, unions and industry groups may not have the power to derail a Warner Bros. deal, but “the more noise you can kick up, the more opposition there is, the more political pressure is brought to bear.”
Yet as the history of Warner Bros. demonstrates, Hollywood is a union town, and organized labor will almost certainly be pondering what options it has beyond making noise. If the unions wish to stand strong for their members before layoffs or worse starts to bite, the strength and solidarity shown in 2023 may be needed once again.
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