JEFFREY BLEHAR: Netflix Is Out on Warner Bros.
I’ll admit, I missed big by predicting something “delightfully sordid.” Instead, we got something unpleasantly sordid: The final nail in the coffin for the Netflix bid was almost certainly board member Susan Rice’s ill-timed appearance on a podcast hosted by Preet Bharara on February 20, where she promised “accountability” for Trump administration wrongdoers once the Democrats took office. This was interpreted by MAGA’s most agitated online voices as a promise of lawfare against the administration — the irony of complaining about this is apparently completely lost upon them — and led to Laura Loomer loudly demanding the former national security adviser resign her position on the board of Netflix.
Since Loomer has Trump’s ear, that meant that Trump himself began to instantly parrot Loomer’s line, demanding Rice resign from Netflix or “pay the consequences.” That put Netflix in an impossible position — they were not going to earn the eternal wrath of progressives by caving to Trump and firing Rice, not for a bid they were going to have extreme difficulty getting Trump’s approval on anyway. So they have bowed to the inevitable and cut their losses.
The upshot is that Netflix’s competitor Paramount — owned by Trump ally David Ellison — now seems all but assured to win the battle to purchase Warner Bros. You will read plenty of shrieking about the dangers of “media consolidation” in the coming days from journalists who all secretly pray to one day work a salaried position at the New York Times; little of it will be worth listening to. On an aesthetic level, some will celebrate the fact that the soulless Netflix will now no longer yank Warner Bros. movies out of theaters — but the death of the theatrical experience can only be delayed, not denied.
I agree with the last statement; as John Podhoretz wrote in December:
But yesterday morning, hours before the WBD-Paramount merger was officially announced, “George MF Washington” published his latest substack: One Step Closer to the Edge.
There is no good option here… Hollywood losing its most storied movie studio is bad for the movie business however you try to slice it. But when I consider the matter of Warner Bros and its two suitors Paramount and Netflix, there are only two things I care about…1) which potential buyer is more likely to treat the Warner Bros library with the respect it deserves… and 2) which suitor is committed to preserving the institution of theatrically released movies, which I still believe is good for the soul of America. What no one in Hollywood’s artist or executive community ought to be doing is rooting for one side or the other because Orange Man Bad.
Instead we ought to remember that oppositional defiance of the Orange Man was one of the main drivers of broad Hollywood support for closing movie theaters in order to protect audiences from a bad cold in 2020. Our industry was certain that we could casually press pause on a wildly successful 100-year-old business model in order to bring about a desirable political outcome, and then simply switch it back on whenever we wished without having to face any economic consequences.
How’d that one turn out?
One of the themes that emerges from left-leaning author Ronald Brownstein’s 2021 book, Rock Me on the Water: 1974 – The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics is how utterly obsessed Hollywood was with Richard Nixon in the 1970s, and how that obsession and paranoia was reflected in their work. Talking about Warren Beatty’s 1975 film Shampoo, Brownstein writes:
The movie presents Nixon’s election as the collective result of Americans’ personal corruption and hypocrisy*. All the televised snippets from Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, about rebuilding respect, upholding law and order, promoting unity, and restoring the nation’s “moral code” are deeply ironic by the time audiences hear them in the movie. And yet this message is delivered in a tone more of sorrow than anger, one that underscores the complicity of the electorate in choosing leaders capable of such immorality. Lester, the businessman who symbolizes America’s establishment, is presented as a figure worthy of understanding, not disdain, when he tells George, “I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore.”
Sound familiar? And yet, Nixon eventually began to garner strange new respect from leftists years after they forced him out of office, and Hollywood produced some pretty good movies in the early to mid 1970s, before Steven Spielberg and George Lucas showed industry executives that the real money lie in depoliticizing their product and remembering how a happy ending does wonders at the box office. In contrast, Hollywood’s hatred of the Bad Orange Man during his first term may have hastened the big screen’s demise by a good decade or so.
* Time magazine’s 1969 Man of the Year collectively smiles.
