For the overwhelming majority of people whose families, jobs, and personal pursuits loom larger than the endless mergers and acquisitions in Hollywood, the hue and cry over Netflix’s plans to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery is likely to elicit not much more than a shrug. To most ordinary, well-adjusted people, the ownership of a movie studio is not much more consequential than the ownership of a baseball team or a chain of restaurants. As long as they still play ball, serve burgers, or, indeed, make movies, who cares?
Admittedly, there is an element of preciousness in all the worry over Warner Bros. being gobbled up by Netflix. After all, it has been a long, long time since studio head Jack Warner roamed the backlot of the studio responsible for such classic films as Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and Now, Voyager. Furthermore, like all movie studios, Warner Bros. is no stranger to being incorporated into larger, seemingly unlikely corporations: In 1969, the studio, which, having already been purchased by Seven Arts, was then known as Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, was acquired by the little-remembered Kinney National Service, whose portfolio of businesses included such inspiring enterprises as operating parking garages. The next time you watch Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, note that an opening credit identifies Warner Bros. as “A Kinney Company.” Does the fact that Kubrick’s universally acclaimed masterpiece was, apparently, funded by parking garage revenue make its notably unpromising vision of the future more or less dystopian?
Yet even as Warner Bros. found itself unceremoniously paired with companies such as Kinney National Service or, in later decades, Time Inc. and America Online, the studio itself remained faithful to its founding purpose: to produce good movies, and to release those movies in large, cavernous structures staffed by unhappy teenagers and marked by the persistent aroma of popcorn. To the uninitiated, such places are popularly known as movie theaters. This commitment survived even Warner Bros.’s rather bizarre union with Discovery, the purveyor of such low-rent cable channels as Food Network, HGTV, and the Travel Channel, in 2022.
If I may be permitted to put on my film critic hat for a moment, I make no great claims for the recent output of Warner Bros. Discovery, but the fact remains that the executives charged with greenlighting productions have been trying: Over the past 12 months, Warner Bros. has released Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, James Gunn’s Superman, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Masterpieces one and all? Surely not. But they are credible films of merit and interest — a nice try in a flailing industry. Put another way, Kubrick is not rolling over in his grave.
Most importantly, audiences still had to trek to theaters, those strange, decaying edifices mentioned a moment ago, to see these offerings. Like all studios, Warner Bros. eventually makes its product available on streaming platforms, but it has stayed true to the long-standing industry belief that a movie should be seen in a theater before it is seen anywhere else.
Netflix, however, is bound by no such tradition. Although it mollifies some of its filmmakers by granting vanishingly brief theatrical runs to some marquee titles, as happened this fall with Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, the company is called “Netflix,” not “Theaterflix.” Its only objective is to hang on to its subscribers, who pay their monthly fee not for the privilege of watching their movies in a theater, where, after all, their fee is no good, but to summon them at will to their laptop or smartphone.
In its press release announcing its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix was careful to note that it “expects to maintain Warner Bros.’ current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films” — a sentiment underscored in subsequent statements by Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. Alas, such assertions have the faint ring of a fearsome new boss telling his panicked employees not to worry — everything will be just fine — before, in the fullness of time, covering the office in reams of pink slips. If Netflix was really, truly on board with the “theatrical releases of films,” in the manner of an old-time studio such as Warner Bros., why would its top brass feel compelled to say so, again and again?
The truth of the matter is that only the show business equivalent of an election denialist could spin the Warner Bros. Discovery-Netflix deal as beneficial to the moviegoing habit. Note that I distinguish here between “moviegoing” and “movie-watching” — the “-going” portion of the word being the most important for my purposes.
For as long as I can remember, seeing a movie meant going to that movie. To wit, the prospective audience member had to undertake multiple concrete actions in furtherance of this objective: driving, walking, or taking public transportation to a movie theater; rounding up friends or family with whom to see the movie; hiring a babysitter to look after any children who were sitting out the movie; selecting a single title from the 10 or 12 or 22 movies that might be playing; waiting in line to buy a ticket; waiting in line to buy concessions; and, most important, reaching some kind of mutual accord with fellow audience members about when to laugh, cry, or shriek — depending on the genre and subject matter of the picture in question, of course. As consumer behavior is concerned, going to a movie is a fairly active activity.
This experience bears no relationship to watching movies in a home environment. In the years before streaming, everyone understood that to catch a movie on the late show, order it on pay-per-view, or even rent a copy from the video store demanded less of the viewer, which is why the experience was always regarded as a counterfeit version of the real thing — like trying to make pizza at home rather than going to an actual pizzeria. It kind of tastes the same, but not really.
Why is this important? To start with, activities that necessitate travel outside of one’s own domiciles are regarded by more and more people as inconveniences at best and ordeals at worst — simply not worth it. The negligible but not illusory effort necessary to go shopping at a department store, attend a concert in a theater or club, or even dine at a restaurant or bar is too much to muster for too many. Instead, American capitalism has furnished its beneficiaries with at-home alternatives that are too attractive not to use.
In the 1980s and ’90s, home-shopping channels and their unacknowledged heir, Amazon, emerged as the leading edge of this phenomenon when they allowed viewers to procure goods simply by placing a phone call or logging on to a website. To be sure, shopping is an act of consumption however it is conducted, but going to a store demands at least the same modest exertion as going to a movie. Depending on the quality of the store, one might even strive to look one’s best rather than lolling around in one’s pajamas, as one is likely to do if conducting Christmas shopping by way of online retailers.
More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic persuaded a significant portion of the population that attending a concert was an unnecessary luxury when the work of every artist in the known universe could simply be dialed up on YouTube, and that going to a restaurant, for which reservations might have to be made and, thus, schedules planned in advance, was too great a burden in the era of Grubhub and DoorDash. Of course, in utilizing such services, we have offloaded the work of doing something, such as picking up food, to others. To put it politely, we have become kingly layabouts.
In this environment, then, we should not take for granted that Warner Bros. and other Hollywood studios continue to play by the old rules: They ask their patrons to make an effort, a shockingly small one, to see their content. Make no mistake: To streamers such as Netflix, the choice to grant theaters chunks of time to show major motion pictures is, in this day and age, a vestigial practice, a ritual, a tradition that only makes sense to baby boomers. And, in a certain sense, they are right. Undoubtedly, there is more money to be made more efficiently by simply depositing the recent Superman directly to streaming services — as Netflix already does with the majority of its own releases, and as it would surely do with any future Superman offshoots that might fall under its purview. In the war for how people consume mass entertainment, Netflix is already the victor to the extent that it bet that the public wants to watch as much as possible as easily as possible.
Yet there is a great social cost exacted by the ease and comfort offered by Netflix and its ilk. If people do not even have to depart their couch to watch the latest blockbuster, how can we expect them to be roused for more demanding things? The Netflixing of American movies is as bad an idea as universal mail-in voting — a supposed convenience that quickly corrupts by deluding its practitioners that there is nothing worth making an effort to do. Indeed, all one has to “do” to watch Netflix is provide a major credit card.
The Netflix deal should not be regarded as an inevitability. Another studio, Paramount, newly folded into Skydance Media, is attempting to engineer its own hostile takeover of Warner Bros., in part with the substantial backing of billionaire Larry Ellison, father of newly enshrined Paramount CEO and Chairman David Ellison. That deal, whatever its merits or demerits as a matter of business, seems likelier to preserve the movie-theater status quo. If Netflix prevails in its efforts, however, the public will have yet another reason to look, and stay, homeward. I readily concede that going to the movies is hardly a substitute for living, but in a society increasingly defined by laziness and lassitude, in which the stuff of life is brought to us rather than sought out by us, it is better than nothing. The grim truth is that Warner Bros. would be better off being part of a parking garage conglomerate once again.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.