MGM (along with the James Bond franchise) is owned by Amazon and Netflix, unfortunately, just secured a takeover of
Warner Bros. Discovery.
No, this doesn’t mean Netflix is buying CNN. Netflix has less interest in buying CNN than you do in buying a rotten cactus and serving it for dinner. For that matter, Netflix doesn’t want any of those Warners cable channels which be spun off into Global Discovery or something and then run up the stock market flagpole to see if anyone is dumb enough to invest in them.
Netflix wants the Warners IPs and HBO which it will roll into the streaming monster, pull movies from theaters 5 minutes after they’re released and then stream them for its gated subscription platform. Considering that Netflix suffers from systemic wokeness on a scale above much of Hollywood, assume Batman will become a black trans man.
MGM and WB are two of the old golden age Hollywood studios that are just now IP boxes for two giant dot com monopolies.
That leaves Paramount, Sony, Universal and Disney still standing. And probably not for very long. Paramount just got sold. Hopefully it works out. Disney is an IP monster. Sony (Columbia) is likely to fall next. Then Universal.
Peak TV was a desperate Hollywood effort to beat Netflix. Instead Netflix just carved up the WB. What that really means is the future isn’t a movie theater, it’s a subscription to Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney+ (I proudly have none of these.)
This streaming business model is bound to go bust, but by then so will a lot of what we used to call entertainment in the 20th century. The Hollywood stuff.
