At the Oscars this month, there was no big sweep of a single movie, but there was a pretty large sweep of a single studio. Warner Bros. walked away with eleven statues that night -nearly half of the total categories and in all but one of the biggest (Best Actress going to a Universal film). With One Battle After Another and Sinners the big winners of the night -and even Weapons winning the only Oscar it was up for, it was a capper on a really stupendous year for the studio where each of those films had been surprise successes alongside big hits like Superman, Final Destination: Bloodlines, The Conjuring: Last Rites, and A Minecraft Movie. Additionally they put out good non-hits in Mickey 17 and Companion. It was really a banner year for Warner Bros. both at the box office and in artistic quality; one that they haven’t had in decades… and will never have again.
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In spite of all of this success, the future for Warner Bros. looks extremely bleak. Ever since they first put themselves up for sale things were not looking good for the studio and when it seemed like Netflix had the upper hand in acquiring them; but the massive twist when Paramount raised their offer so much and with outright ridiculous promises, that Netflix left the table and conceded the company to the Ellisons made the bad situation worse and all but ensured the company’s demise in one way or another if it should go through. That last bit is important, and this large a merger is a long process that needs to get by a few guardrails including congressional approval where there is a chance it could be blocked. But the company going on the market and being sold to another massive company is in any case the likeliest future for one of the most monumental American film studios, a major player since 1923 -one of the Big Five of the classic Hollywood era that has produced countless classics and that has an enormous number of significant entertainment brands under its purview.
Last year I alluded to the danger posed by the Ellisons if they were to get control of Warner Bros., a company they largely coveted for its CNN brand, which Trump is already requesting changes to. Control of the American news media might be their biggest priority and the most tangibly disastrous, but the concerns are genuine over what they will do to Warner Bros. and its legacy. There are three options before them.
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The first is to either explicitly or subtly take creative control of the studio, approving projects, creators, talent, and input on Warner Bros. studio films -governing what kinds of movies can be made. These would likely be the most risk-averse projects -franchise and brand vehicles no matter how stupid- with little consideration for auteur-driven films or bold kinds of stories like those that just swept the Oscars. Though David Ellison claimed to like One Battle After Another he has also reportedly indicated no interest in funding something that might struggle to make back its budget -One Battle After Another was the highest-grossing film of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career but it still fell short of this threshold. And you can bet that no director will be getting a deal like Ryan Coogler did for Sinners -just in case it is a hit- so that the company can own the film in perpetuity. This would result in a much more boring slate of movies coming out of Warner Bros., especially if Paramount tries to hold true to their impossible goal of releasing thirty films in theatres per year. And of course, this could come packaged with a helping of right-wing propaganda -the Ellisons being in the pocket of Trump. Perhaps it would not be particularly overt -audiences can spot it, and in spite of the claims of many conservatives, the vast majority of viewers do not want every movie to be Melania or Lady Ballers. But there may be more films with broad messaging, traditionalist aesthetics, and “apolitical” storytelling; and at the same time less movies produced about black or LGBTQ characters and themes. We may see disgraced entertainment figures given comeback platforms, as is already happening at Paramount with Brett Rattner and Max Landis. And in light of this all, a critical apathy could manifest among audiences to these movements and choices -especially as it impacts brands with toxic fan culture like DC. Knowing how many of these billionaire weirdos love Lord of the Rings (to the point fascist puppet-master Peter Thiel actually named his company Palantir), I shudder to think what they are going to do with that intellectual property.
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The second option is the polar opposite of the first, but almost just as bad. Satisfied enough with ownership of CNN, Paramount could just follow Disney’s example and all but shutter Warner Bros. beyond a couple of its most lucrative properties. The company that still put out new and original movies on a regular basis, either through Warners directly or one of its subsidiaries, would effectively cease to exist, same as what has happened to Fox under Disney, where virtually nothing new but Alien and Predator installments have been released. DC will be kept, they’ll endeavour to milk Harry Potter and possibly Game of Thrones, but no investment would be made in new movies -certainly not at any reasonably generous budget of the kind that directors like Anderson and Ryan Coogler enjoyed last year. It would be simply a shell for I.P. This route for Warner Bros. would be especially catastrophic for the smaller brands within that company -it may finally spell the real end for TCM- and for the actual people who run them and make our entertainments. We know that whatever form the deal takes will come with enormous lay-offs, gutting further an industry that depends on so many. It would be a seismic rift that could result in an employment crisis in Hollywood. And on top of it all, a Hollywood without Warner Bros. is such a gravitational concept. They’ve not only always been there but they’ve always been a major player -much more so than Paramount. It just feels wrong to wipe them from the board.
Lastly, the best-case scenario is perhaps the least likely option and that is for Paramount to be almost entirely hands-off with Warner Bros. Give them the money and resources to do their own thing as they have been for years -now without David Zaslav at the helm- and otherwise not touch the brand at all. Let it operate for all intended purposes, independently -like a sister studio more than a subsidiary. This image of Warner Bros' future aligns somewhat with what Paramount aims to sell the merger as as reassurance -but few are buying it. Especially with Trump and his ilk already making plans and the conservative media sphere celebrating.
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But whatever direction the Ellisons take the studio in, the merger will result in job losses on a grand scale. And my real worry might be less for the production studio of Warner Bros. itself as much as its many subsidiaries. HBO and DC, being the brands with the most name recognition and famous properties, are likely to be pretty safe -at least as far as their general existence goes. But I'm worried about Cartoon Network, and I'm especially worried about TCM. I can’t imagine animation and children’s programming being much of a priority for these folks, certainly not anything meaningful from the crowd who gets mad at a years-old show for possibly featuring a non-binary protagonist. Cartoon Network seems like an easy sacrificial lamb, but not so easy as TCM -one of the few Warner Bros. properties genuinely doing good work when it comes to film preservation, film education, and media literacy. It is a cable channel with an outsized importance in keeping classic cinema alive for generations that have few other ways of engaging with it -given the collapse of rental stores, reruns, and how most streamers are deathly afraid of platforming anything made before the 1990s. The loss of TCM would be deeply problematic for the future of cinephilia. But given its lack of revenue, I can easily see the Ellisons, despite their claims of being movie lovers, decommissioning it for a tax write-off, worse than what Zaslav almost did. And ironically among the several other subsidiaries that could be threatened is Discovery -where Zaslav originally came from when Warner Bros. merged with them. His former home, an educational outlet specializing (supposedly) in documentary programming on the climate and natural world -which we know the bosses of Paramount aren’t fond of- might well be doomed by his decision to sell all of Warner Bros. He really does ultimately destroy everything he touches, and gets to leave with a multi-million dollar settlement. And just on a curious note, it baffles me how in these mergers it is the CEO from the much smaller company who somehow gains control of the whole conglomerate, Zaslav going from Discovery to the whole of Warner Bros., David Ellison coming from Skydance to run all of Paramount, and now doing the same for the much much bigger Warner Bros.
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It appears fated that Warner Bros. will become a shell of itself. And so again it would appear that this year’s Oscars were the end of an era. The deal hasn’t gone through yet of course, there is plenty of time for more Warners releases to come before that happens. Wuthering Heights and The Bride! have released already this year -the former a great success, the latter not so much. The studio has not drawn its last breath as an independent creative entity. But they will not have the year again that 2025 was, or the validation that the Oscars gave to their best movies. It is almost as though the Academy knew and allowed them one last hurrah before they are absorbed, infected, or stripped for parts. It might read as poetic or bittersweet in the history books, though it is quite sad as well. Not necessarily for Warner Bros. as its own brand (its brand has never been consistent and that has never mattered), but for the shrinking of Hollywood. There are now anywhere between five and ten producers of major motion pictures and almost none of them have any real interest in the ‘movie’ side of the movie business. The fact that Amazon and Apple are making movies is really bizarre when you take a moment to think about it -imagine a movie by Ubisoft or eBay or Wal-Mart. These are not companies that have any interest in movies on their own terms -merely seeing them as the profit machines they could be. The days of the real moguls are over. Elon Musk is going to be producing movies before too long and you know how horrendous they’re going to be.
In this environment perhaps it was inevitable that Warner Bros. would eventually die, even without the help of the Ellisons. The landscape is just too drastically different from not only when the studio was founded but when the world of Hollywood was more consistent and stable (and studios were limited from monopolies by, ironically, the Paramount Decrees). It is so much more of a consolidated, smaller industry, that for now is at least lucky to have avenues like A24 and distributors like Neon to make up a portion of what the major studios have lost in terms of diversity of output –until these too are ultimately bought out and artistically decimated. It is a bleak industry without the cost of this merger, and with Zaslav at the helm it was maybe just a matter of time before something this drastic happened to Warner Bros. It isn’t a sudden death, the signs were there. All good things must come to an end.
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And Warner Bros. was good. As much as a profit-driven corporate entity can be good within an atmosphere of modestly healthy competition amongst counterparts of a similar size and scope. It is obviously not some holy brand or infallible exhibitor of art –quite the opposite in fact. It has had severe low periods through its history, done its fair share to delineate art, and especially of late has just done a lot of dumb and callous shit. It has been as calculating and compromised as any other studio, has hindered cinema as many times as it has helped cinema. The argument could be made that Warner Bros. is just a name that doesn’t ultimately mean anything. And I wouldn’t entirely disagree.
But it was a vessel through which great art was able to get made over the decades, reach an audience, and influence the culture. Warner Bros. was at the forefront of innovation in cinema during its early days -it holds the distinction of producing the first talkie, The Jazz Singer. Warner Bros. gave us Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rebel Without a Cause, My Fair Lady, Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Blazing Saddles, Dog Day Afternoon, All the President’s Men, The Shining, Blade Runner, Purple Rain, Goodfellas, Malcolm X, The Iron Giant, The Matrix, and the Looney Tunes. That is just a snippet and before factoring in the output of any of the other libraries and companies it acquired over the years. It has paid its dues.
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So it is a sorry heart that acknowledges its end and fears for its future under Paramount. It is a severe loss to the movie industry that may only be mitigated by a revolution in how movies are owned and controlled. Or by the studio system itself falling into irrelevance, which is not going to happen any time soon. Whether or not Warner Bros. survives this sale even remotely intact, 2025 will still have been a swansong for what the studio was and what it was capable of even in this warped environment that Hollywood has been in for the last couple decades. And the Oscars were that last culmination. I hope this is hyperbole but I suspect it is not, which isn’t necessarily to spell doom outright for the movies. There is clearly an appetite for something different, as Sinners and One Battle After Another, and even Weapons represented. I don’t doubt that there will come movies from other avenues receptive to that need. It just may not be that Paramount-Warner Bros. can accommodate it -certainly not if it maintains its vile leadership.
I’ve written about Warner Bros. several times over the years; this may be the last. It had a good run, at its best it propelled the art form forward. What becomes of it now we can only witness with low expectations. But for how large it has loomed on its own and for what it has signified as part of a reasonably fair ecosystem among sister studios before they began cannibalizing each other, well… that’s all folks.
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