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When it comes to creating irresistible storylines, Netflix, the home of Stranger Things<\/em> and The Crown<\/em>, is second to none. And as the streaming video giant delivered its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, executives were in top storytelling form, pitching what they promise will be a smash hit: the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s co-CEOs, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, said the deal, which values Warner Brothers Discovery at $83 billion, will accelerate its own core streaming business while helping it expand into TV and the theatrical film business.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an exciting time in the business. Lots of innovation, lots of competition,\u201d Sarandos enthused on Tuesday\u2019s earnings conference call. Netflix has a history of successful transformation and of pivoting opportunistically, he reminded the audience: Once upon a time, its main business entailed mailing DVDs in red envelopes to customers\u2019 homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite Sarandos\u2019 confident delivery, however, the pitch didn\u2019t land with investors. The company\u2019s stock, which was already down 15% since Netflix announced the deal in early December, sank another 4.9% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n Netflix\u2019s financial results for the final quarter of 2025 were fine. The company beat EPS expectations by a penny, and said it now has 325 million paid subscribers and a worldwide total audience nearing 1 billion. Its 2026 revenue outlook, of between $50.7 billion and $51.7 billion, was right on target.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, investors are worried that the Warner Bros. deal will force Netflix to compete outside its lane, causing management to lose focus. The fact that Netflix will temporarily halt its share buybacks in order to accumulate cash to help finance the deal, as it disclosed towards the bottom of Tuesday\u2019s shareholder letter, probably didn\u2019t help matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n And given that there\u2019s a rival offer for Warner Bros from Paramount Skydance, it\u2019s not unreasonable for investors to worry that Netflix may be forced into an expensive bidding war. (Even though Warner Brothers Discovery has accepted the Netflix offer over Paramount\u2019s, no one believes the story is over\u2014not even Netflix, which updated its $27.75 per share offer to all-cash, instead of stock and cash, hours earlier on Tuesday in order to provide WBD shareholders with \u201cgreater value certainty.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n Warner Brothers investors are not the only audience that Netflix needs to win over. The deal must be blessed by antitrust regulators\u2014a prospect whose outcome is harder to predict than ever in the Trump administration.<\/p>\n Sarandos and Peters laid out the case Tuesday for why they believe the deal will get through the regulatory process, framing the deal as a boon for American jobs.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is going to allow us to significantly expand\u00a0our production capacity in the U.S. and to keep investing in original content in the long term, which means more opportunities for creative talent and more jobs,\u201d Sarandos said.<\/p>\n Referring to Warner Brothers\u2019 television and film businesses, he added that \u201cthese folks have extensive experience and expertise. We want them to stay on and run those businesses. We\u2019re expanding content creation not collapsing it.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a compelling story. But the co-CEOs may have neglected to study the most important script of all when it comes to getting government approval in the current administration; they forgot to recite the Trump lines.\u00a0<\/p>\n The example has been set over the past 12 months by peers such as Nvidia\u2019s Jensen Huang and Meta\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg. The latter, with his company facing various federal regulatory threats, began publicly praising the Trump administration on an earnings call last January.\u00a0<\/p>\n And Nvidia\u2019s Huang has already seen real dividends from a similar strategy. The chip company CEO has praised Trump repeatedly on earnings calls, in media interviews, and in conference keynote speeches, calling him \u201cAmerica\u2019s unique advantage\u201d in AI. Since then, the U.S. ban on selling Nvidia\u2019s H200 AI chips to China has been rescinded.\u00a0The praise may have been coincidental to the outcome, but it certainly didn\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n In contrast, the president went unmentioned on Tuesday\u2019s call. How significant Netflix\u2019s omission of a Trump call-out turns out to be remains to be seen; maybe it won\u2019t matter at all. But it\u2019s worth noting that its competitor for Warner Bros., Paramount Skydance, is helmed by David Ellison, an outspoken Trump supporter.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a storyline that Netflix should have seen coming, and itmay still send the company back to rewrite.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Netflixs #earnings #call #coCEOs #quell #fears #Warner #Bros #bid<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When it comes to creating irre… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[1680,458,124,9756,322,540,9755,461,719,9757,627,457,577],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\nInvestors are wary; will regulators balk?<\/h2>\n