The White House abusing anti trust powers to force the sale to a more ideologically aligned buyer group (that also happens to include his son in law…) is incredibly bleak and also seems like the most likely outcome
It’s sad that in all the coverage of the deal in non political outlets, the fact that the white house will influence the deal for ideological reasons is a given. Just sliding into authoritarianism.
A lot of Trump's abuses are hard to fit into a sound bite but I think some form of "the Trump administration blocked this corporate deal to force the sale to go instead to a company run by his son-in-law" can be understood by the average voter as corrupt.
Well, Trump is doing such a good job on affordability that it makes it easy to look past the authoritarian-- er, no that's not quite right...what exactly IS his administration doing to warrant the ~40% approval? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes.
Given today's partisanship, I wonder how low any approval rating can go. It may be what we're seeing is the number of people who just can't stand the other side. 40% of Americans will approve of their guy almost no matter what, because giving any credit to the other side is anathema.
I wonder if the ill effects hyper-partisanship can somewhat offset by a winning margin of low info swing voters that allow more radical moves. Just an example: Would swing voters really care about the number of SCOTUS justices increasing if they didn’t know the number in 2025? Dems could announce that any corrupt mergers will be aggressively investigated in 2029.
I don't have much of a view on the pros and cons of the proposed mergers, but on films competing with vertical video I do have a couple:
1. The one place where I regularly successfully commit to spending 2-3 hours continuously watching a film, never checking my phone or being distracted with some other digital media, is the physical cinema. I'm sure I'm not alone in this - it takes a real effort to focus fully on even a compelling film without that physical location & social pressure to do so. I think there's a risk that something more would be lost if cinemas do become a "cultural hubs in big cities" only thing, especially once future generations grow up without having regularly watched films (properly).
2. In most non-US countries I'd expect it to be much harder to replicate the quality of the audio-visual experience at home due to lower wages and greater cost of space. This might mean that (non super-niche) cinemas survive much longer in Europe than in the US. A good quality cinema room in the south-east of England is the sort of thing you hear about professional sportsmen getting installed, not decently well off two earner families.
I totally sympathize with #1, but it relates back to a general take I'm having when it comes to being distracted by digital media.
Just don't be distracted! Put your phone in another room when you're trying to watch a movie or read a book. When you're partner gets up and goes to the bathroom at dinner, look around at the dining room, scrolling through twitter is stupid. This is how humans did things for a long long time and I'm confident we can still do it if we set our mind to it.
I don't think so... we have a lot of evidence that no matter how sincere a commitment is at a population level it will be overridden by impulse for almost everyone.
Same, but not just for movies—it’s even more true in my case for long books.
I find myself almost looking forward to a long flight or train ride just because I know it will be easier to focus on reading without the full panoply of digital distractions I have at home.
Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I’ve been showing up at libraries more often not to check out books per se, but to just sit down and *focus* on the books that I already have.
Depending on the theater, the apparent viewing size of a 75 inch TV is pretty comparable to a theater screen. The sound from the TV is pretty bad, but sound bars give some improvement. And you can install a big screen, projector, and actual Dolby Atmos at home, though it’s expensive.
When I was 20, I had good enough hearing to notice the quality of a $800 speaker, but could only afford a $100 speaker. Now that I'm 30, my hearing is worse and I can only hear the difference of a $200 speaker even though I can finally afford a $800 one. When I'm 40 I think my wallet will be at $1500 and my ears will be at $100. Sad times.
I've been doing that since my thirties when we discovered that the dishwasher just wrecks sound in the low-ranges (and coming up from watching fansubs in college it's just natural now).
I guess I would disagree there because after I turned 40 I sure as heck can tell the difference between “having a center channel” and “trying to parse out incomprehensible dialogue from the muddy left/right mix”.
its somewhat the opposite for sports equipment where your physical decline can be partially offset by more expensive, lighter and better gear up to a point.
Wait is this not what the ideal at home sound system is anymore? I currently just have two (quite nice) stereo speakers but have been thinking about adding surround.
Soundbar is the most anybody does now, pretty much. I'm currently running 3.0 and thinking about adding a sub, but that's way, way, way beyond the standard now.
There hasn't been that much innovation in speakers in a long time. I have inherited my parents' 1970s speakers (older than I am) and they still sound great. They're bigger and heavier than an equivalent modern pair, but the audio quality isn't much different.
There's lots of innovation in encoding and multi-channel and acoustics and amplification and so on, but the actual mechanical speakers haven't improved much in 50+ years.
I have a 4K projector, 120 in. screen, and 5.1.4 Dolby Atmos setup in my basement. Ironically though, not only do I not care about going to the theater, I don't even go downstairs for a movie that often. I rarely want to be completely absorbed in a movie, which feels like hours just disappear from my life. I am not sure what this says about me, but I think it's not uncommon.
I wonder if there is a window for entrepreneurs to build mini-theaters. Like, a smallish neighborhood theater that families could rent with other families. Or just pay for entry like a vending machine.
I’ve given up streaming for going to movie theaters and I couldn’t be happier. I don’t even feel like I’ve become disconnected from the culture because it’s become so fragmented there was no hope there anyway.
I live close enough to a cinema (actually two - a big multiplex and an arthouse) that I can just pop out. I should start doing that more often, the tickets aren't that expensive as long as I don't bother with popcorn or drinks.
You miss three important things about the culture at Netflix, Matt:
1. Netflix is run by strategy consultants (ex-McKinseyites I believe. Their culture is that of strategy memos. It's very alien to anyone from the culture of Hollywood.
2. They are entirely data-driven, rather than deal-driven. A normal producer will pull together a source (e.g., IP or author), a production team, and a financial backer and get contracts in place based on the desire to work together. Netflix is far more analytical, which means less risk-taking. If it hasn't been made before, it won't show up in the data and won't get made.
3. They run a shop that is very intense. If you work for them you will be in the 10% that align and can cut it and become a superstar. If you are in the 90% they will pay you well for a few years to learn all they can from you and then cut you loose. They are very up-front about all this. Hollywood is not known for stability, but this is a new flavor of instability.
The common thread is that culturally although Netflix gets stuff made because they listen to the data and are the 800 pound gorilla, art is art and even though Hollywood has always been a business, the culture at Netflix is so strategically optimized that true creativity may be stifled.
From an antitrust perspective it may be the case that consolidation under Netflix would prevent a lot of good things from ever getting made in favor of an assembly line of sameness.
On the other hand, Ellison, Kushner, and the Saudis would probably more proactively make things that should never get made!
I believe that 2 is true, which might make it less fun from the perspective of actually working there (i.e. Who doesn't want to work with his buddies as opposed to whatever the data nerds are saying?)
However, the good thing about Netflix is that it TAKES RISKS, which means that it can create some really great series that wouldn't be possible otherwise (i.e. Squid Game).
In the end, art has always been in a love-hate relationship with business, and business is always changing.
I hope that if the Netflix deal goes through, then Netflix mantain a separation of the two brands: One a high-volume brand with a wide range in quality (Netflix proper), and the other a low-volume high-quality brand (HBO).
I think this is a good take. Netflix wants to be the everything company. If you want slop, here's slop. If you want prestige, well, click on our HBO tile and check out our prestige television.
I don’t think this works in practice. I dropped Netflix several years ago (occasionally re upping just long enough to watch a new season of the Great British Bake Off) and have not missed it at all. When I look for anything watchable and am instead presented with endless slop, your service is a slophouse.
The switch from granular 5-star ratings to thumbs up / thumbs down was the beginning of the end. “This was not, unlike certain other films, worthless garbage, but I do not consider it high enough quality to rise above average” is a meaningful rating signal, dammit.
"I dropped Netflix several years ago (occasionally re upping just long enough to watch a new season of the Great British Bake Off) and have not missed it at all."
I don't understand how this could be anything but true? As in, if you subscribe to Paramount+ for a bit, watch some shows and then cancel the service, are you saddened in someway by having cut the service that you aren't by Netflix?
Well, sometimes I cancel a Substack subscription and then they publish an article I’d like to read, so I’m like, “I don’t regret canceling in general but I do miss having the subscription at the moment.” That could apply to Netflix.
My point was that I don't think this is unique to Netflix in anyway, but true of subscription services in general. EG seems to think Netflix is worse in some way...
Star ratings are (or rather were) extremely robust as far as "this is a quality film," and in allowing to sort by the same. They just didn't correlate as strongly as Netflix wanted with the metric that Netflix chose to to optimize for, which was "people will tolerate this enough not to turn it off." Netflix's internal film-evaluation calibrations became extremely untrustworthy as soon as they started making their own content (no, I do not want to watch the latest slop-output just because Netflix made it and it's new. Stop trying to make fetch happen) and decided to willfully Goodhart their own metrics by maximizing viewership minutes as a proxy for subjective consumer surplus.
There's tons of slop on Netflix. There's also a lot of good, enjoyable stuff. You don't have to watch the slop and it's not that hard to find the good stuff. Just watched "Jay Kelly." Very good and very enjoyable.
It's like going to a bookstore and noting that there's tons of junk books and slamming the whole concept. Read the good stuff they have instead.
It's also baffling to me that they took so long to give an option to turn off the autoplay feature of their menus to the point major directors were publicly complaining about it.
That was the thinking behind MAX but there was insufficient slop to allow HBO to retreat into its own niche, so quality seemed diluted. This could work better with Netflix.
Yes. They added Max to HBO to signal there was more to watch, then dropped HBO from the overall name partly for simplicity (undoing confusion with HBO Go, etc.) but also to separate the HBO brand from slop.
Which is much like any old TV network. When I was a teen watching TV all day long, Days Of Our Lives, The People's Court, Jerry Springer, Inside Edition, Seinfeld, Homicide, and ER were on the same channel.
Does Netflix take risks? Or did they just luck out by having less direct HQ oversight of their Korean division? It's not even the only East Asian death game show on their platform.
Was shocked to read that. In my view, Netflix specifically *doesn't* take risks, it plays the odds and does volume. Which is totally fine, but everything it puts out is painfully safe and, I'm sorry, 90% of it is slop. The other 10% is like a facsimile of "prestige" television.
Yeah, but you're not gonna tell me Netflix expected to make money on Fincher's black and white homage to his father.
All studios try to build prestige by going into business with auteurs but I just don't seem to ever like their films. I'm not going to act like it's all Netflix's fault, on some level, they might actually need to have more of a producer's hand on some of these prestige projects.
Off the top of the dome I've got: Marriage Story (good), Don't Look Up (pretty bad), The Irishman (long enough now we can admit not very good), Power of the Dog (good-ish), Maestro (bad), Emilia Perez (best not to talk about it), Western Front (good), Mank (I liked it but can guarantee no one else has seen it).
Like those are their "prestige" films, that I can recall. Super bad rate, imo.
Iow, Netflix makes/releases at least as many Oscar bait "prestige" films as anyone else and, like all studios, they release lots of crap too.
The best thing about Netflix is that their business model precludes an Ahab-like focus on releasing the next monster tentpole movie based on some comic book IP that will make over a billion dollars and that it instead gives them more flexibility for leasing more comedies, rom-coms, middle brow dramas and the like. We really need that missing middle which the studios have abandoned.
I mean, pretty much every studio has one or two movies a year they hope to have an Oscar campaign for. That's the baseline, not a sign of a company that takes risks. Disney does that and they seem pretty risk averse as well. Roma came out 7 years ago and it didn't really signal much.
“However, the good thing about Netflix is that it TAKES RISKS, which means that it can create some really great series that wouldn't be possible otherwise (i.e. Squid Game).”
What about Squid Games makes us think it’s some sort of design rather than something that accidentally escaped the slop factory (kinda like Casablanca and the studio movie system)?
I’d say that Netflix’s quality hit rate seems actually quite low, and they are famous for terminating shows at the whiff of them not being successful enough.
I don't know... Shows like Brand New Cherry Flavor and Archive 81 were some of the best television I had seen that year, and a lot of Netflix limited series are all about risk and pretty fun imo. Netflix definitely takes risks.
Your comment implies much of Hollywood hasn't long been dominated by the pursuit of profits. But it has! And complaints that "true creativity may be stifled" are as old as the movie business itself.
Another way to think of this is that in the old model someone who saw 30 movies a year in the theater was 15x more important to the studios than someone who saw 2. Your goal was to make as many of those as possible. Now your goal is just to make sure everyone pays $17.99/month, so every household is equally "valuable" in the market. I am pretty sure the people who spend like $600/year on movies in the theater are going to want more interesting stuff than casual viewers, even if streaming makes it cheaper for them.
Not the OP. But to me the difference is that for Netflix the product is the algorithm, the movies are essentially secondary. A commercial imperative that's trying to get you to spend $15 on a movie ticket is a much different one than just trying to make sure there's a steady stream of content to keep people occupied in an "all-you-can-eat" model. The commercial imperative of a situation where you have to pay for the movie requires at least some sort of hook or a director/actor with a track record...
From talking to people who have worked for Netflix, they are focused a lot more on creating a pipeline of easy-to-produce content and trying to skirt around union rules for behind-the-scenes staff than actually making quality narratives, which is a bad sign if you liked the type of "well-produced entertainment for adults" HBO was known for.
Maybe. But the Disney acquisition of Pixar worked really well (and helped change the culture at Disney). Maybe HBO would have a similar effect on Netflix.
Up to a point it worked but now we’re in a place where the last good Pixar movie was Turning Red (2022) and the last good one before that was Coco (2017). If they didn’t kill the golden goose they at least throttled it a bit.
Had to double check 1. because Netflix is pretty famously NOT a big consulting user and yes ... none of the ELT comes from consulting. If anything Netflix or Reed specifically is / was trying to replicate the internal competitive dynamics of Bridgewater whereby they have this incredible "talent density" and probably not incorrectly believe they're far better run than any consulting shop.
Netflix makes a lot of "prestige" stuff, like Roma (yuck), The Irishman (yawn), The Power of the Dog (blech). It's not just all data-based optimization.
The problem is that they make prestige films that I don't like. As Matt notes, their problem may be that they give the creatives *too* much independence.
>> If it hasn't been made before, it won't show up in the data and won't get made.
This is my biggest issue with them. Everything they make is derivative, whereas HBO actually takes risks.
(Edit: another commenter mentioned that Netflix does take risks in the international shows, which I agree with, but seems a consequence of being a truly global company).
Does Stranger Things fit that mold? My impression of it was that the idea was moderately original (as far as traditional horror can be) even though the production was all very detailed 80s homage.
10 years ago they had Orange is the New Black, House of Cards (granted it was an adaptation but felt fresh), Stranger Things, etc. They seemed to take a more traditional approach of "if you were successful come to me with your wild ideas and we'll consider them".
Somewhere along the line they switched to "this thing is popular, let's make our own version of it", which is how we ended up with shows like Ozark that are clearly "Breaking Bad set in the south instead of southwest".
There is absolutely nothing original about Stranger Things. Every piece of it had been done numerous times before across media (movies, TV, comics, etc.).
Which is the point of the show in the first place... now of the new things they've done giving Clerics the "Dimension Door" spell in the AD&D ruleset is amongst them.
I often say to my wife that some of Netflix's shows feel like they were produced by an algorithm - "there's a gap in the market for a Southern rom-com with small-town vibes and 2.3 black or gay characters"
I remember listening to a podcast interview with a Netflix person years back and your third point rings true. I’m sure it’s unpleasant to work under other types of uncertainty in the entertainment industry, but having to swallow a whole new flavor of it might be tough for HBO type creators.
I'm frustrated with the coverage of this debate, which tends to define "choice" in terms of how the merger will affect creativity. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised because the coverage comes from people in the creativity business. Yes, a Netflix-HBO merger would reduce competition in Hollywood and probably stifle some creativity. But I think most ordinary people (consumers) would gladly forgo a little creativity in exchange for paying for one less service. For most people, more streaming services is a false choice. They’re not choosing between the different shows on different services. They’re choosing between the *services themselves.* Media critics may have access to all the creativity across all the services. But most families pick the one (or maybe two) that suits them best and stick with it. Netflix is by far the most popular streaming service. I’m confident that most families would prefer having HBO’s content available through their existing Netflix subscription—even if it cost a small premium and even if the programming became less distinct moving forward. My complete thoughts at: https://foundhistory.org/netflix-and-hbo/
I feel like I'm the only crazy person who wants to go back to pay per view. Just charge me $1/hr for whatever I watch and then I don't have to play the stupid game of if it's worth subscribing or not.
I get the appeal, but pay per view seems to always be priced in a way to exploit consumers. Even the Blockbuster video days, we were paying $3-4 for a single movie (not too bad, but adjust that for inflation), and you damned well better return it on time. But that, or even more expensive cable PPV, was the only option to see anything on demand (unless your family was super cheap and relied on the local library instead. Not mine of course, just um some families that I know)
Sure but if you think about it in terms of your free time, watching a movie that seems like it'd be a ripoff to watch $5 a la carte is a pretty bad use of time.
I'm skeptical of the idea that this is going to produce a consumer bonanza where people just "pay for one less service." You'll pay for one less service at the price of the previous two services plus 20% and you'll get lower quality slop.* Nobody in this equation is optimizing for you to spend less of your income on streaming.
* And the precursor of lower-quality slop is "forgoing a little more creativity"; it's just that consumers won't understand this until they're left with fewer options and a worse end-product.
I’m skeptical that a new Netflix could get away with charging 220%, but maybe. And then again there’s always the possibility that with we might end up with BOTH more slop AND more subscriptions to pay if a deal doesn’t go through.
Netflix has ~300 million customers and HBO has ~100 million. Without knowing the overlap of those customer bases it's hard to make statements about pricing, but assume full overlap: they could charge all their customers 1/3 of the current HBO price and still break even. This will be awesome for some people (who currently pay, or want to) but the downside is that lots of customers will end up paying a lot more for content they don't want. This is basically what cable TV used to do: force you to pay for ESPN or Fox News even if you never watched those channels.
If you thought the old bundled cable TV model was a good deal, then this will be too. And maybe YouTube will bound the new revenue that Netflix can obtain from this; on the other hand, if so, then the Netflix executives are making a bad bet. And between the two of us and those executives, I'd guess they have both the most information and the most to lose.
Your scenario assumes no merger (not Netflix, not Paramount, not Comcast) takes place. That’s not realistic. Mine assumes it’s going to be Netflix or Paramount, and I think the Netflix one is better.
I’m criticizing the idea that these mergers are good, not supporting the alternative. If someone offers me the choice of a sh*t sandwich or a quesadilla made from broken glass, I guess I’ll eat the sandwich. But I don’t have to like it.
I'm pretty much where Matt is on this: I'm basically fine with Netflix doing this deal if that's how it shakes out. But what are the odds this is what transpires? I really doubt Trump will allow a political ally of his to lose. And yes, it indeed sucks that this last sentence plausibly describes the state of US business culture in 2025.
I also want to comment on this:
>...if you’re just trying to do propaganda on behalf of the Trump administration, you could just buy CNN<
Which is what's going to happen, right? CNN's days as a trusted provider of news are numbered. Netflix doesn't want that part, and so, even if Paramount's bid loses out to Netflix, the CNN portion, I predict, will indeed fall into the hands of a MAGA-friendly plutocrat.
The rightward turn going on the mainstream media is really something. Out of curiosity, I've been following CBS News on Twitter (since it's less time consuming than actually watching it) and its turn to subtly and not so subtly giving Trump a pass if not outright boosting him is quite obvious.
Yeah that's the weird part, if the Netflix deal goes through, the rump company with all the cable channels will still be there. So like Matt says, Ellison seemingly wants the movie mogul prestige.
I am afraid that they are not going to want to give up CNN as a punching bag, and although it will be completely captured they will set up a heel/face dynamic with CNN and Fox News. It will basically become the Colmes News Network Network to Fox's Hannity. Liberal perspectives, presented disingenuously, and intentionally lamely, to drive people to the right.
Under its current ownership CNN is pretty much already doing this, as a blended political-business strategy to try to avoid getting obliterated by either Trump or their ratings. But it could be much more shameless and coordinated. Consider that if CNN ended up part of the right wing media machine it would no longer even be obligated to make a profit. Somebody would prop it up to earn themselves a favor from the regime.
1. I barely go to the movies anymore because the costs are outrageous. $25 a ticket and then $25 for a popcorn and coke (that’s costs them less than a dollar). Yes home entertainment systems are better, but the movie theatre experience would still be valuable if it were more reasonably priced.
2. I’ve alway thought it was a shame that streaming services compete on differentiated content libraries. Music streaming works much better - all the big platforms have 99% of songs, and they compete on price, quality and features.
Where are people spending that much? In my neck of the woods, a not exactly cheap part of the country, I pay for tickets what I did as a kid, adjusting for inflation. For popcorn, sneak in a candy bar instead or something.
If the issue is lack of demand, I don't think they'd be killing theaters with high prices.
When you lose the casual consumer and your audience is a small number of people obsessed with film, making the theater much nicer and charging way more is the correct strategy. And that's where theaters have gone the last few years.
Again, I'll say, I've never seen a ticket go for that much, even in a high-priced metro area. I think theaters are largely going in the opposite direction to snag repeat-viewers. Subscription services, after the Moviepass fiasco have popped up at most chains. They're a pretty good deal, and save money if you go at least once or twice a month, and you save on popcorn.
I don't think the fact that theaters are going for repeat customers really contradicts the idea they're chasing a shrinking audience of people who like theaters. But I'm glad your tickets are more reasonable than mine
I checked Flix Brewhouse (fancy reclining chair-and-food theater) for Avatar on Friday night and the ticket is $18 online or $16 in person. Seems reasonable adjusted for inflation and quality improvements like the nicer chair.
Hot food and a drink menu is also an improvement over an oversized tub of popcorn.
I don't understand why some people are hyperbolize everything to a cartoonish degree. "MY GROCERIES COST FOUR TIMES AS MUCH IN 2024 AS THEY DID IN 2020!" Like, listen bud, I'm sorry that your groceries cost ~40% more, but a little perspective?
Tickets are like $18 and the popcorn and coke are like $12 (and it's trivial to bring in your own). Why make up numbers? Those are already pretty high!
I've paid $25 for a ticket I think but it was for a "D-Box" show, in 3D with moving seats, and I could have paid much less to just watch the movie.
Agree. If consumer welfare is going to be the standard, what would be good for consumers is if the Library of Congress created a universal streaming library of all the movies and TV shows. Consumers don't benefit from the endless copyright extensions or corporate strategies that make it hard to access things.
I think it would be more reasonable for the LOC to offer such a streaming service for any content that hasn't aired for some minimum amount of time in the preceding two years or something like that. That would deal with orphaned works and incentivize rights holders to sort out legal disputes that suffocate re-releases.
I’d love data on whether movies are in fact much more expensive these days (which is a feeling I share as well) or if I just anchored on prices from my youth without adjusting for inflation, when going to the movies and getting some popcorn or candy felt like something my family would do as the splurge outing for the week instead of going to Applebees or mini golf.
Counterpoint: My wife hates Alamo Drafthouse with the heat of 1000 suns because of the food service -- she doesn't want to be interrupted by servers during a movie and she doesn't want to smell or listen to other people eating.
I've paid less than that at major chain theaters in midtown Manhattan. How are you paying $25 a ticket? That's how much I pay for a monthly AMC subscription that gives me multiple free tickets a week.
I just open up fandango and it’s 25 for imax 20 for standard at the nearest theater but I can find 16 though the odds of people talking at 16 are approximately 100 percent.
The streaming landscape is a lot more fragmented than you make out in this piece. You totally omitted Hulu and Prime Video. Apple TV doesn't have huge market share but they have a disproportionate amount of the very best original content, like Severance and Foundation. And there are any number of smaller niche services like Mubi and Tubi
That happened already. Hulu was originally a service co-owned by ABC, NBC, and Fox (Fx). Disney bought Fox. NBC sold its stake to Disney last year, and Disney already owned ABC.
Apple somehow manages to produce some of the best and the worst “high touch” shows. Eg Severance vs Invasion. Wtf happened to Invasion? I’m still mad about that sucking so hard.
I just couldn't buy into the premise of Severance and dislike a show about a shadowy corporation and "what are they *really* up to."
Pluribus, on the other hand, starts off with a cool "what would it be like if X happened?" and then runs some really interesting variants on it. I mean the loss of human dignity and all that is terrible, but isn't Mr. Diabate's reaction to his new situation rather enticing in its way? And while Manousos's unfaltering stand of resisting all assistance is admirable, isn't it, well, just a bit too much? (They don't want to be paid for the gas, dude!)
I just hope Gilligan doesn't reveal some sinister purpose behind the aliens. That would be deflating.
Severance really went off the rails when it started to be a mystery box show. Season 2 had some great episodes, but I worry the show is going into LOST territory.
The sinister purpose is that they forcibly take over everyone's consciousness and destroy individuals choice and agency while condemning every human to a slow painful death because of their own religious/philosophical commitments. As far as we know, the actual people could be trapped in their own bodies, watching the whole time as they and everyone they know die as slaves to an alien entity that cares nothing for them.
It's the plot of the whole show. You didn't think any of that was sinister?
With Netflix you have a group of executives who don’t have any taste and despise the theatrical movie going experience. How many Netflix movies are forever movies? The Irishman and Marriage Story. Is there anymore? Warner alone released two this year in OBAA and Sinners. Ten years down the road we will see the most important studio in Hollywood releasing a few tentpole films a year in theaters and the rest will be slop for streaming.
With Paramount you have a group of executives who don’t have any taste (unless you only like Mission Impossible) and a right wing / foreign takeover of media properties. At least the theatrical experience will be saved? But at what cost to society.
As someone who's more familiar with Marvel's cinematic oeuvre than I'd like to be, I was trying to figure out what Marvel content "OBAA" was that featured both the Inhuman Lockjaw and the Illuminati, let alone how the latter was portrayed as "racist" in anything possibly outside of X-Men content.
Eddington will be remembered as the better movie about the '20s. I expected to hate it, and really enjoyed it. One Battle After Another was as expected, a bit incoherent and silly, stepping on it's own feet a bit. Forgettable.
It's actually a good movie, which I did not expect given that it's ostensibly about contentious and polarizing political issues (this is actually just the backdrop).
Everyone is talking about affordability today, but I don't think anyone believes that either of these mergers is going to result in lower streaming prices. And outside of housing, it feels like we have managed to optimize "consumer welfare" all the way into an economy that everyone hates.
We are not going back to the Netflix era of 2010-2017 anyway, when Netflix seemingly had all the best, binge-able content for $10 a month. That was a product of ZIRP VC investment and other studios undervaluing their content libraries.
Yeah, but in 2020-23, I could get discs from Netflix, which was a far, FAR larger catalog than their streaming service. (I genuinely struggle with whether to keep the streaming service.)
Well, even if Netflix will cost more once it has HBO’s content, it probably won’t cost as much as a Netflix subscription plus an HBO subscription do together now.
Netflix has a profit stream of X, and they're paying (a cash price) for a future profit stream of Y from HBO. Presumably if things go the Netflix executives' way, this will result in a future overall profit stream greater or equal to X+Y.
There are many ways to get there, but the most obvious top-level ideas are: (1) force existing Netflix+HBO customers to pay the same or higher price (combined) for the products, or (2) force millions of non-HBO Netflix customers to pay a slightly higher price (or vice versa) in exchange for new HBO content. I suppose this last idea could be a bonanza for some customers, who really wanted HBO content but were put off by the sticker price of HBO itself. My guess is that it will suck for other people who didn't want HBO, but will now pay for it anyway. The one thing I'm relatively convinced of is that less competition and choice will *not* result in people paying less for the services they really want.
My understanding is that $2.5-3bn is across the whole WB business (nearly $38bn yearly revenue), which is much larger than just the HBO streaming service I’m talking about here. So maybe 8% of revenue, and here we’re hoping these are real synergies and don’t come at the price of cutting content creation. So — and don’t pick on this number, it’s mostly a joke — that’s $0.88 saved if you apply it uniformly to the price of the ad-supported $10.99 tier of HBO.
Well, Y won't just come from HBO, but also from Warner, plus all that IP. So they don't necessarily have to charge the same combined price to get to X+Y. Of course, if that's what's most profitable, it's what they will do! I'm just not sure it will be, since the wide availability of free video (YouTube, etc.) is likely to put something of a ceiling on how much Netflix can profitably charge.
Antitrust enforcement is a bandwidth issue for the DOJ and FTC. There is plenty of anticompetitive behavior in the healthcare industry and a strong case could be made that the behavior is illegal. I don’t know all the details, but Netflix buying HBO doesn’t strike me as bad for the consumer.
I feel like I’m a little skeptical that this deal goes through and movie theaters are all Thanos snapped away replaced and demolished.
It seems like the likelier outcome is a smaller number of theaters, bad but not cataclysmic, possibly owned by the major studios conglomerates.
I went to see zootopia 2 at Disney springs and then went to dinner after and probably spent like over 200 dollars all told. What is AMC providing here?
This is a good opportunity for me to unfurl a take that has been very unpopular in almost all my social circles: I don't particularly enjoy the movie theater experience, so I'm not remotely bent out of shape about the potential Netflix deal threatening it.
I say this as someone who both loves movies and is deeply concerned about the general decline of in-person socializing in the wake of the streaming explosion, Covid, etc. So it's not that I don't like watching movies or getting together with people. I love doing both of those things.
I personally feel that at-home entertainment systems have reached the point where the theater is just not worth various costs. These include high ticket and concession prices, the fact that if you go to the bathroom you're going to miss some amount of the movie, the time-pressure of knowing you have to get to the theater early if you want good seats, the (in my opinion) somewhat claustrophobic seating arrangements, and whatever time and money expenses you incur on the trip to and from the theater.
If a movie is released on a streaming service, it's nearly impossible for me to think of a reason(s) I'd go to the theater to see it instead. I can invite people over to watch it on my affordable enormous TV, we can buy snacks at the market rate, and pause if/when we want to. It's just more pleasant to me.
All this to say, if the deal leads to increased production of high-quality films and TV shows and hastens the demise of the theater, well, I won't go as far as calling it a "win-win," out of respect for the majority of my friends who genuinely seem to enjoy the theater experience. I'll gently say instead that'd be a worthwhile tradeoff.
Movie theaters served an essential purpose when I was a teenager -- they gave us an opportunity to get together and get away from our parents. Teenagers don't seem nearly as anxious to get away from their parents these days, and they can watch movies at each other's houses, I suppose. I don't know if they do, though. Seems like they just watch them on their phones.
I don't know what kind of theater you go to but the theaters I've been to lately have downright enormous seats which are reserved so you don't have to get there early. And AMC now tells you the movies starts 25-30 minutes after the "showtime" so the previews are optional lol. It's true it is not an especially cheap night out though.
The Paramount bid doesn’t seem like a legitimate market transaction but an attempt at Trump gaining control—WBD has 5x the market cap of PSKY, shouldn’t they be the acquirers if there’s going to be a merger? So you kind of have to hope Netflix wins if that’s the alternative.
I still can’t believe Democrats didn’t even try to stop the Twitter takeover because they were too busy going after the Roomba acquisition and then affirmatively handed TikTok to Trump. If there’s a next Democratic administration they need to put a lot of thought into reversing the Trumpist media takeover which is surely worth way more points on the margin than any amount of moderation will get you.
The White House abusing anti trust powers to force the sale to a more ideologically aligned buyer group (that also happens to include his son in law…) is incredibly bleak and also seems like the most likely outcome
It’s sad that in all the coverage of the deal in non political outlets, the fact that the white house will influence the deal for ideological reasons is a given. Just sliding into authoritarianism.
A lot of Trump's abuses are hard to fit into a sound bite but I think some form of "the Trump administration blocked this corporate deal to force the sale to go instead to a company run by his son-in-law" can be understood by the average voter as corrupt.
But but - egg prices!!
Even after inflation eggs were very cheap but a politician trying to say this is treading dangerous water.
A 3-egg omelette is a nutritious filling meal that costs about a dollar.
You say that but the history of this stuff is that it’s a huge white elephant.
I suspect that the ideological part isn't the most important factor. This deal is foremost about money
Yeah, I mean for me the really bleak part of this is Trump making clear that he's gonna get paid either way.
The corruption and power abuse is so routine now as to be almost unnoticeable.
I have no idea why it doesn't bother voters more.
Well, Trump is doing such a good job on affordability that it makes it easy to look past the authoritarian-- er, no that's not quite right...what exactly IS his administration doing to warrant the ~40% approval? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes.
Given today's partisanship, I wonder how low any approval rating can go. It may be what we're seeing is the number of people who just can't stand the other side. 40% of Americans will approve of their guy almost no matter what, because giving any credit to the other side is anathema.
I wonder if the ill effects hyper-partisanship can somewhat offset by a winning margin of low info swing voters that allow more radical moves. Just an example: Would swing voters really care about the number of SCOTUS justices increasing if they didn’t know the number in 2025? Dems could announce that any corrupt mergers will be aggressively investigated in 2029.
It isn't good but the end result would be to increase political and ideological diversity in Hollywood rather than decrease it.
I don't have much of a view on the pros and cons of the proposed mergers, but on films competing with vertical video I do have a couple:
1. The one place where I regularly successfully commit to spending 2-3 hours continuously watching a film, never checking my phone or being distracted with some other digital media, is the physical cinema. I'm sure I'm not alone in this - it takes a real effort to focus fully on even a compelling film without that physical location & social pressure to do so. I think there's a risk that something more would be lost if cinemas do become a "cultural hubs in big cities" only thing, especially once future generations grow up without having regularly watched films (properly).
2. In most non-US countries I'd expect it to be much harder to replicate the quality of the audio-visual experience at home due to lower wages and greater cost of space. This might mean that (non super-niche) cinemas survive much longer in Europe than in the US. A good quality cinema room in the south-east of England is the sort of thing you hear about professional sportsmen getting installed, not decently well off two earner families.
I totally sympathize with #1, but it relates back to a general take I'm having when it comes to being distracted by digital media.
Just don't be distracted! Put your phone in another room when you're trying to watch a movie or read a book. When you're partner gets up and goes to the bathroom at dinner, look around at the dining room, scrolling through twitter is stupid. This is how humans did things for a long long time and I'm confident we can still do it if we set our mind to it.
I don't think so... we have a lot of evidence that no matter how sincere a commitment is at a population level it will be overridden by impulse for almost everyone.
That is fine like individual level advice I guess but at a population level people it's not going to happen.
the other place where 1 applies (for me) is on long haul flights
I find myself catching up on the popular canon of movies that I’ve never seen before on flights.
Same, but not just for movies—it’s even more true in my case for long books.
I find myself almost looking forward to a long flight or train ride just because I know it will be easier to focus on reading without the full panoply of digital distractions I have at home.
Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I’ve been showing up at libraries more often not to check out books per se, but to just sit down and *focus* on the books that I already have.
Depending on the theater, the apparent viewing size of a 75 inch TV is pretty comparable to a theater screen. The sound from the TV is pretty bad, but sound bars give some improvement. And you can install a big screen, projector, and actual Dolby Atmos at home, though it’s expensive.
When I was 20, I had good enough hearing to notice the quality of a $800 speaker, but could only afford a $100 speaker. Now that I'm 30, my hearing is worse and I can only hear the difference of a $200 speaker even though I can finally afford a $800 one. When I'm 40 I think my wallet will be at $1500 and my ears will be at $100. Sad times.
At 50, you're mostly just reading the subtitles.
Especially as the quality of sound engineering in films and television continues to plummet.
One heretical opinion I've developed over the past fifteen years or so is that for the most part dynamic range is bad, actually.
Audio AND visual!
/attempts to stare daggers at GoT in the blackness; misses
I've been doing that since my thirties when we discovered that the dishwasher just wrecks sound in the low-ranges (and coming up from watching fansubs in college it's just natural now).
I guess I would disagree there because after I turned 40 I sure as heck can tell the difference between “having a center channel” and “trying to parse out incomprehensible dialogue from the muddy left/right mix”.
its somewhat the opposite for sports equipment where your physical decline can be partially offset by more expensive, lighter and better gear up to a point.
You could rock it like the 90s and 2000s and get some speakers and a surround receiver.
Wait is this not what the ideal at home sound system is anymore? I currently just have two (quite nice) stereo speakers but have been thinking about adding surround.
Soundbar is the most anybody does now, pretty much. I'm currently running 3.0 and thinking about adding a sub, but that's way, way, way beyond the standard now.
Dolby Atmos for movies at least.
My Boston Soundworks speakers that I got in 2000 still sound good to me, pumped through my Onkyo receiver. Never gone beyond 5.1 though.
There hasn't been that much innovation in speakers in a long time. I have inherited my parents' 1970s speakers (older than I am) and they still sound great. They're bigger and heavier than an equivalent modern pair, but the audio quality isn't much different.
There's lots of innovation in encoding and multi-channel and acoustics and amplification and so on, but the actual mechanical speakers haven't improved much in 50+ years.
I have a 4K projector, 120 in. screen, and 5.1.4 Dolby Atmos setup in my basement. Ironically though, not only do I not care about going to the theater, I don't even go downstairs for a movie that often. I rarely want to be completely absorbed in a movie, which feels like hours just disappear from my life. I am not sure what this says about me, but I think it's not uncommon.
Why do you have that setup if you don’t like watching movies?
I think my tastes are just changing over time. Not sure if I will do it again if/when I move.
I wonder if there is a window for entrepreneurs to build mini-theaters. Like, a smallish neighborhood theater that families could rent with other families. Or just pay for entry like a vending machine.
Just spitballing.
https://www.somervilletheatre.com/theatre-rentals/microcinema/
Yep! That's what I was imagining. I wouldn't pay that much though. Maybe for a kids party.
I’ve given up streaming for going to movie theaters and I couldn’t be happier. I don’t even feel like I’ve become disconnected from the culture because it’s become so fragmented there was no hope there anyway.
I live close enough to a cinema (actually two - a big multiplex and an arthouse) that I can just pop out. I should start doing that more often, the tickets aren't that expensive as long as I don't bother with popcorn or drinks.
Get popcorn and drinks as well. It’s more fun that way.
Sure, but I can see twice as many films if I don't!
You miss three important things about the culture at Netflix, Matt:
1. Netflix is run by strategy consultants (ex-McKinseyites I believe. Their culture is that of strategy memos. It's very alien to anyone from the culture of Hollywood.
2. They are entirely data-driven, rather than deal-driven. A normal producer will pull together a source (e.g., IP or author), a production team, and a financial backer and get contracts in place based on the desire to work together. Netflix is far more analytical, which means less risk-taking. If it hasn't been made before, it won't show up in the data and won't get made.
3. They run a shop that is very intense. If you work for them you will be in the 10% that align and can cut it and become a superstar. If you are in the 90% they will pay you well for a few years to learn all they can from you and then cut you loose. They are very up-front about all this. Hollywood is not known for stability, but this is a new flavor of instability.
The common thread is that culturally although Netflix gets stuff made because they listen to the data and are the 800 pound gorilla, art is art and even though Hollywood has always been a business, the culture at Netflix is so strategically optimized that true creativity may be stifled.
From an antitrust perspective it may be the case that consolidation under Netflix would prevent a lot of good things from ever getting made in favor of an assembly line of sameness.
On the other hand, Ellison, Kushner, and the Saudis would probably more proactively make things that should never get made!
I'm torn.
I believe that 2 is true, which might make it less fun from the perspective of actually working there (i.e. Who doesn't want to work with his buddies as opposed to whatever the data nerds are saying?)
However, the good thing about Netflix is that it TAKES RISKS, which means that it can create some really great series that wouldn't be possible otherwise (i.e. Squid Game).
In the end, art has always been in a love-hate relationship with business, and business is always changing.
I hope that if the Netflix deal goes through, then Netflix mantain a separation of the two brands: One a high-volume brand with a wide range in quality (Netflix proper), and the other a low-volume high-quality brand (HBO).
I think this is a good take. Netflix wants to be the everything company. If you want slop, here's slop. If you want prestige, well, click on our HBO tile and check out our prestige television.
I don’t think this works in practice. I dropped Netflix several years ago (occasionally re upping just long enough to watch a new season of the Great British Bake Off) and have not missed it at all. When I look for anything watchable and am instead presented with endless slop, your service is a slophouse.
The switch from granular 5-star ratings to thumbs up / thumbs down was the beginning of the end. “This was not, unlike certain other films, worthless garbage, but I do not consider it high enough quality to rise above average” is a meaningful rating signal, dammit.
Adolescence was excellent.
So good that it is now one of the main policy engines for the UK.
"I dropped Netflix several years ago (occasionally re upping just long enough to watch a new season of the Great British Bake Off) and have not missed it at all."
I don't understand how this could be anything but true? As in, if you subscribe to Paramount+ for a bit, watch some shows and then cancel the service, are you saddened in someway by having cut the service that you aren't by Netflix?
Well, sometimes I cancel a Substack subscription and then they publish an article I’d like to read, so I’m like, “I don’t regret canceling in general but I do miss having the subscription at the moment.” That could apply to Netflix.
My point was that I don't think this is unique to Netflix in anyway, but true of subscription services in general. EG seems to think Netflix is worse in some way...
Star ratings don’t work, actually
Star ratings are (or rather were) extremely robust as far as "this is a quality film," and in allowing to sort by the same. They just didn't correlate as strongly as Netflix wanted with the metric that Netflix chose to to optimize for, which was "people will tolerate this enough not to turn it off." Netflix's internal film-evaluation calibrations became extremely untrustworthy as soon as they started making their own content (no, I do not want to watch the latest slop-output just because Netflix made it and it's new. Stop trying to make fetch happen) and decided to willfully Goodhart their own metrics by maximizing viewership minutes as a proxy for subjective consumer surplus.
There's tons of slop on Netflix. There's also a lot of good, enjoyable stuff. You don't have to watch the slop and it's not that hard to find the good stuff. Just watched "Jay Kelly." Very good and very enjoyable.
It's like going to a bookstore and noting that there's tons of junk books and slamming the whole concept. Read the good stuff they have instead.
It's also baffling to me that they took so long to give an option to turn off the autoplay feature of their menus to the point major directors were publicly complaining about it.
That was the thinking behind MAX but there was insufficient slop to allow HBO to retreat into its own niche, so quality seemed diluted. This could work better with Netflix.
Is that why they constantly changed the name?
Yes. They added Max to HBO to signal there was more to watch, then dropped HBO from the overall name partly for simplicity (undoing confusion with HBO Go, etc.) but also to separate the HBO brand from slop.
Which is much like any old TV network. When I was a teen watching TV all day long, Days Of Our Lives, The People's Court, Jerry Springer, Inside Edition, Seinfeld, Homicide, and ER were on the same channel.
Does Netflix take risks? Or did they just luck out by having less direct HQ oversight of their Korean division? It's not even the only East Asian death game show on their platform.
Was shocked to read that. In my view, Netflix specifically *doesn't* take risks, it plays the odds and does volume. Which is totally fine, but everything it puts out is painfully safe and, I'm sorry, 90% of it is slop. The other 10% is like a facsimile of "prestige" television.
I don't think this is at all accurate. They often feature small-audience Oscar-bait movies.
And as for 90% being slop, that's the definition of all cultural products.
Yeah, but you're not gonna tell me Netflix expected to make money on Fincher's black and white homage to his father.
All studios try to build prestige by going into business with auteurs but I just don't seem to ever like their films. I'm not going to act like it's all Netflix's fault, on some level, they might actually need to have more of a producer's hand on some of these prestige projects.
Off the top of the dome I've got: Marriage Story (good), Don't Look Up (pretty bad), The Irishman (long enough now we can admit not very good), Power of the Dog (good-ish), Maestro (bad), Emilia Perez (best not to talk about it), Western Front (good), Mank (I liked it but can guarantee no one else has seen it).
Like those are their "prestige" films, that I can recall. Super bad rate, imo.
I liked Mank.
Iow, Netflix makes/releases at least as many Oscar bait "prestige" films as anyone else and, like all studios, they release lots of crap too.
The best thing about Netflix is that their business model precludes an Ahab-like focus on releasing the next monster tentpole movie based on some comic book IP that will make over a billion dollars and that it instead gives them more flexibility for leasing more comedies, rom-coms, middle brow dramas and the like. We really need that missing middle which the studios have abandoned.
I think The Irishman is excellent, except the de-aging didn’t work. Whatever, that’s an old Hollywood problem.
I mean, pretty much every studio has one or two movies a year they hope to have an Oscar campaign for. That's the baseline, not a sign of a company that takes risks. Disney does that and they seem pretty risk averse as well. Roma came out 7 years ago and it didn't really signal much.
In other words, Netflix is like all the other studios. (And there's a lot more than just Roma.)
“However, the good thing about Netflix is that it TAKES RISKS, which means that it can create some really great series that wouldn't be possible otherwise (i.e. Squid Game).”
What about Squid Games makes us think it’s some sort of design rather than something that accidentally escaped the slop factory (kinda like Casablanca and the studio movie system)?
I’d say that Netflix’s quality hit rate seems actually quite low, and they are famous for terminating shows at the whiff of them not being successful enough.
I don't know... Shows like Brand New Cherry Flavor and Archive 81 were some of the best television I had seen that year, and a lot of Netflix limited series are all about risk and pretty fun imo. Netflix definitely takes risks.
How would you redesign their home screen to help viewers navigate two separate brands? Or would you recommend a separate HBO app?
Your comment implies much of Hollywood hasn't long been dominated by the pursuit of profits. But it has! And complaints that "true creativity may be stifled" are as old as the movie business itself.
Another way to think of this is that in the old model someone who saw 30 movies a year in the theater was 15x more important to the studios than someone who saw 2. Your goal was to make as many of those as possible. Now your goal is just to make sure everyone pays $17.99/month, so every household is equally "valuable" in the market. I am pretty sure the people who spend like $600/year on movies in the theater are going to want more interesting stuff than casual viewers, even if streaming makes it cheaper for them.
Not the OP. But to me the difference is that for Netflix the product is the algorithm, the movies are essentially secondary. A commercial imperative that's trying to get you to spend $15 on a movie ticket is a much different one than just trying to make sure there's a steady stream of content to keep people occupied in an "all-you-can-eat" model. The commercial imperative of a situation where you have to pay for the movie requires at least some sort of hook or a director/actor with a track record...
I think this is most evident in the documentary section, where Netflix has 280 movies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Netflix_original_documentary_films
Most of these are so insignificant they don't even have a rotten tomatoes score. It's just a cheap way to stuff the library with fan service.
From talking to people who have worked for Netflix, they are focused a lot more on creating a pipeline of easy-to-produce content and trying to skirt around union rules for behind-the-scenes staff than actually making quality narratives, which is a bad sign if you liked the type of "well-produced entertainment for adults" HBO was known for.
Maybe. But the Disney acquisition of Pixar worked really well (and helped change the culture at Disney). Maybe HBO would have a similar effect on Netflix.
Up to a point it worked but now we’re in a place where the last good Pixar movie was Turning Red (2022) and the last good one before that was Coco (2017). If they didn’t kill the golden goose they at least throttled it a bit.
They had a good long run after Disney acquired Pixar in 2006. Lasseter leaving in 2018 told you how good things would be moving forward.
As a movie buff, the Netflix option seems quite bad, but Ellison is such a stooge, that it says something how this seems like a better option.
Yes, I think the Netflix folks love movies far more than a creepy nepo baby like David Ellison.
Although to be fair it looks like we're finally going to get Rush Hour 4 which I'm sure will be watched and remembered for centuries.
Had to double check 1. because Netflix is pretty famously NOT a big consulting user and yes ... none of the ELT comes from consulting. If anything Netflix or Reed specifically is / was trying to replicate the internal competitive dynamics of Bridgewater whereby they have this incredible "talent density" and probably not incorrectly believe they're far better run than any consulting shop.
Netflix makes a lot of "prestige" stuff, like Roma (yuck), The Irishman (yawn), The Power of the Dog (blech). It's not just all data-based optimization.
The problem is that they make prestige films that I don't like. As Matt notes, their problem may be that they give the creatives *too* much independence.
" If it hasn't been made before, it won't show up in the data and won't get made."
And yet somehow we've all been watching K-Pop Demon hunters all year.
I feel like Netflix takes far more risks than the studios do, so this take feels backwards to me.
Squid Game, Bridgerton, One Piece, Arcane, ...
Looking over Warner's theatrical releases for 2023 doesn't look like any kind of artistic risk taking to me:
https://warnerbros.fandom.com/wiki/2023
>> If it hasn't been made before, it won't show up in the data and won't get made.
This is my biggest issue with them. Everything they make is derivative, whereas HBO actually takes risks.
(Edit: another commenter mentioned that Netflix does take risks in the international shows, which I agree with, but seems a consequence of being a truly global company).
Does Stranger Things fit that mold? My impression of it was that the idea was moderately original (as far as traditional horror can be) even though the production was all very detailed 80s homage.
10 years ago they had Orange is the New Black, House of Cards (granted it was an adaptation but felt fresh), Stranger Things, etc. They seemed to take a more traditional approach of "if you were successful come to me with your wild ideas and we'll consider them".
Somewhere along the line they switched to "this thing is popular, let's make our own version of it", which is how we ended up with shows like Ozark that are clearly "Breaking Bad set in the south instead of southwest".
Also "take popular thing and add super heroes to it." RuPaul's Drag Race is popular? Make a drag animated super hero show. K-Pop? K-Pop Demon Hunters.
Pretty much sounds like show business overall though, no?
There is absolutely nothing original about Stranger Things. Every piece of it had been done numerous times before across media (movies, TV, comics, etc.).
Which is the point of the show in the first place... now of the new things they've done giving Clerics the "Dimension Door" spell in the AD&D ruleset is amongst them.
They take tremendous risks in terms of business strategy (that's the memo culture).
They don't take as many creative risks because those decisions are data-driven.
Netflix engages best with people who work well in the first bucket, not so much the second. That's the tension I see coming down the line with HBO.
I often say to my wife that some of Netflix's shows feel like they were produced by an algorithm - "there's a gap in the market for a Southern rom-com with small-town vibes and 2.3 black or gay characters"
I remember listening to a podcast interview with a Netflix person years back and your third point rings true. I’m sure it’s unpleasant to work under other types of uncertainty in the entertainment industry, but having to swallow a whole new flavor of it might be tough for HBO type creators.
Relevant culture memo from them, which was all the rage a few years ago: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/culture-1798664/1798664
Update from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/business/media/netflix-corporate-culture.html
I'm frustrated with the coverage of this debate, which tends to define "choice" in terms of how the merger will affect creativity. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised because the coverage comes from people in the creativity business. Yes, a Netflix-HBO merger would reduce competition in Hollywood and probably stifle some creativity. But I think most ordinary people (consumers) would gladly forgo a little creativity in exchange for paying for one less service. For most people, more streaming services is a false choice. They’re not choosing between the different shows on different services. They’re choosing between the *services themselves.* Media critics may have access to all the creativity across all the services. But most families pick the one (or maybe two) that suits them best and stick with it. Netflix is by far the most popular streaming service. I’m confident that most families would prefer having HBO’s content available through their existing Netflix subscription—even if it cost a small premium and even if the programming became less distinct moving forward. My complete thoughts at: https://foundhistory.org/netflix-and-hbo/
> paying for one less service
I feel like I'm the only crazy person who wants to go back to pay per view. Just charge me $1/hr for whatever I watch and then I don't have to play the stupid game of if it's worth subscribing or not.
I get the appeal, but pay per view seems to always be priced in a way to exploit consumers. Even the Blockbuster video days, we were paying $3-4 for a single movie (not too bad, but adjust that for inflation), and you damned well better return it on time. But that, or even more expensive cable PPV, was the only option to see anything on demand (unless your family was super cheap and relied on the local library instead. Not mine of course, just um some families that I know)
Sure but if you think about it in terms of your free time, watching a movie that seems like it'd be a ripoff to watch $5 a la carte is a pretty bad use of time.
I get that from Amazon already if I want a specific movie, so no, let's not do that.
Agreed. There are too many services right now
I'm skeptical of the idea that this is going to produce a consumer bonanza where people just "pay for one less service." You'll pay for one less service at the price of the previous two services plus 20% and you'll get lower quality slop.* Nobody in this equation is optimizing for you to spend less of your income on streaming.
* And the precursor of lower-quality slop is "forgoing a little more creativity"; it's just that consumers won't understand this until they're left with fewer options and a worse end-product.
I’m skeptical that a new Netflix could get away with charging 220%, but maybe. And then again there’s always the possibility that with we might end up with BOTH more slop AND more subscriptions to pay if a deal doesn’t go through.
Netflix has ~300 million customers and HBO has ~100 million. Without knowing the overlap of those customer bases it's hard to make statements about pricing, but assume full overlap: they could charge all their customers 1/3 of the current HBO price and still break even. This will be awesome for some people (who currently pay, or want to) but the downside is that lots of customers will end up paying a lot more for content they don't want. This is basically what cable TV used to do: force you to pay for ESPN or Fox News even if you never watched those channels.
If you thought the old bundled cable TV model was a good deal, then this will be too. And maybe YouTube will bound the new revenue that Netflix can obtain from this; on the other hand, if so, then the Netflix executives are making a bad bet. And between the two of us and those executives, I'd guess they have both the most information and the most to lose.
Your scenario assumes no merger (not Netflix, not Paramount, not Comcast) takes place. That’s not realistic. Mine assumes it’s going to be Netflix or Paramount, and I think the Netflix one is better.
I’m criticizing the idea that these mergers are good, not supporting the alternative. If someone offers me the choice of a sh*t sandwich or a quesadilla made from broken glass, I guess I’ll eat the sandwich. But I don’t have to like it.
Sure. I won’t argue with that. I’m just making a different point.
I'm pretty much where Matt is on this: I'm basically fine with Netflix doing this deal if that's how it shakes out. But what are the odds this is what transpires? I really doubt Trump will allow a political ally of his to lose. And yes, it indeed sucks that this last sentence plausibly describes the state of US business culture in 2025.
I also want to comment on this:
>...if you’re just trying to do propaganda on behalf of the Trump administration, you could just buy CNN<
Which is what's going to happen, right? CNN's days as a trusted provider of news are numbered. Netflix doesn't want that part, and so, even if Paramount's bid loses out to Netflix, the CNN portion, I predict, will indeed fall into the hands of a MAGA-friendly plutocrat.
The rightward turn going on the mainstream media is really something. Out of curiosity, I've been following CBS News on Twitter (since it's less time consuming than actually watching it) and its turn to subtly and not so subtly giving Trump a pass if not outright boosting him is quite obvious.
So my intuition that Bari Weiss is in fact a piece of shit was correct?
Yeah that's the weird part, if the Netflix deal goes through, the rump company with all the cable channels will still be there. So like Matt says, Ellison seemingly wants the movie mogul prestige.
I am afraid that they are not going to want to give up CNN as a punching bag, and although it will be completely captured they will set up a heel/face dynamic with CNN and Fox News. It will basically become the Colmes News Network Network to Fox's Hannity. Liberal perspectives, presented disingenuously, and intentionally lamely, to drive people to the right.
Under its current ownership CNN is pretty much already doing this, as a blended political-business strategy to try to avoid getting obliterated by either Trump or their ratings. But it could be much more shameless and coordinated. Consider that if CNN ended up part of the right wing media machine it would no longer even be obligated to make a profit. Somebody would prop it up to earn themselves a favor from the regime.
1. I barely go to the movies anymore because the costs are outrageous. $25 a ticket and then $25 for a popcorn and coke (that’s costs them less than a dollar). Yes home entertainment systems are better, but the movie theatre experience would still be valuable if it were more reasonably priced.
2. I’ve alway thought it was a shame that streaming services compete on differentiated content libraries. Music streaming works much better - all the big platforms have 99% of songs, and they compete on price, quality and features.
Where are people spending that much? In my neck of the woods, a not exactly cheap part of the country, I pay for tickets what I did as a kid, adjusting for inflation. For popcorn, sneak in a candy bar instead or something.
If the issue is lack of demand, I don't think they'd be killing theaters with high prices.
When you lose the casual consumer and your audience is a small number of people obsessed with film, making the theater much nicer and charging way more is the correct strategy. And that's where theaters have gone the last few years.
Again, I'll say, I've never seen a ticket go for that much, even in a high-priced metro area. I think theaters are largely going in the opposite direction to snag repeat-viewers. Subscription services, after the Moviepass fiasco have popped up at most chains. They're a pretty good deal, and save money if you go at least once or twice a month, and you save on popcorn.
I don't think the fact that theaters are going for repeat customers really contradicts the idea they're chasing a shrinking audience of people who like theaters. But I'm glad your tickets are more reasonable than mine
They’re $20+ here. More at the IMAX, but that’s the IMAX.
I just check Alamo Drafthouse which is the closest theater to me (Lakeview in Chicago) and it's $22.60 for a Fri@6pm movie.
The last movie I saw in theaters was Wicked in DC last week, and those tickets were $20 each at AMC
I checked Flix Brewhouse (fancy reclining chair-and-food theater) for Avatar on Friday night and the ticket is $18 online or $16 in person. Seems reasonable adjusted for inflation and quality improvements like the nicer chair.
Hot food and a drink menu is also an improvement over an oversized tub of popcorn.
The thing I don't like about those super comfortable reclining chairs is that it is too easy to fall asleep and waste the movie ticket!
Depending on how bad the movie is, that could be a perk!
You should appreciate popcorn more.
Depends on when you were a kid! We 90s kids are paying more. https://nitter.net/mattyglesias/status/1997403375814488435#m
I don't understand why some people are hyperbolize everything to a cartoonish degree. "MY GROCERIES COST FOUR TIMES AS MUCH IN 2024 AS THEY DID IN 2020!" Like, listen bud, I'm sorry that your groceries cost ~40% more, but a little perspective?
Tickets are like $18 and the popcorn and coke are like $12 (and it's trivial to bring in your own). Why make up numbers? Those are already pretty high!
I've paid $25 for a ticket I think but it was for a "D-Box" show, in 3D with moving seats, and I could have paid much less to just watch the movie.
Agree. If consumer welfare is going to be the standard, what would be good for consumers is if the Library of Congress created a universal streaming library of all the movies and TV shows. Consumers don't benefit from the endless copyright extensions or corporate strategies that make it hard to access things.
I think it would be more reasonable for the LOC to offer such a streaming service for any content that hasn't aired for some minimum amount of time in the preceding two years or something like that. That would deal with orphaned works and incentivize rights holders to sort out legal disputes that suffocate re-releases.
I've found my people.
ASCAP but for video is surely a way to destroy the entire content industry. I support this wholeheartedly.
I’d love data on whether movies are in fact much more expensive these days (which is a feeling I share as well) or if I just anchored on prices from my youth without adjusting for inflation, when going to the movies and getting some popcorn or candy felt like something my family would do as the splurge outing for the week instead of going to Applebees or mini golf.
Matt has actually tweeted about this! They are more expensive in inflation-adjusted terms than they were in the 90s, but not their highest ever. https://nitter.net/mattyglesias/status/1997403375814488435#m
I pay more money (not $25, not even $20) now than we used to 10 years ago but we have big recliner seats.
It's well-understood that the popcorn and coke are there for price-insensitive customers.
Make Sneaking Cans In Great Again
Guilty.
1) Alamo Drafthouse is the answer. The $40 price tag feels a lot better when the food is actually quality.
Counterpoint: My wife hates Alamo Drafthouse with the heat of 1000 suns because of the food service -- she doesn't want to be interrupted by servers during a movie and she doesn't want to smell or listen to other people eating.
Honestly, the biggest bonus is probably that they'll kick people out who are obnoxious.
I've paid less than that at major chain theaters in midtown Manhattan. How are you paying $25 a ticket? That's how much I pay for a monthly AMC subscription that gives me multiple free tickets a week.
I just open up fandango and it’s 25 for imax 20 for standard at the nearest theater but I can find 16 though the odds of people talking at 16 are approximately 100 percent.
Ahmed al Ahmed - it's like that scene from Patriot Games but in real life.
https://youtu.be/KnhDO1G0ieY?si=ZTnDZoFCH_WR3O54
The streaming landscape is a lot more fragmented than you make out in this piece. You totally omitted Hulu and Prime Video. Apple TV doesn't have huge market share but they have a disproportionate amount of the very best original content, like Severance and Foundation. And there are any number of smaller niche services like Mubi and Tubi
Isn't Hulu being consolidated with Disney+?
That happened already. Hulu was originally a service co-owned by ABC, NBC, and Fox (Fx). Disney bought Fox. NBC sold its stake to Disney last year, and Disney already owned ABC.
Apple somehow manages to produce some of the best and the worst “high touch” shows. Eg Severance vs Invasion. Wtf happened to Invasion? I’m still mad about that sucking so hard.
Gave up on Severance. The Studio and Pluribus are definitely worth watching.
Wait how did you not like Severance but also like Pluribus? They feel very similar to me.
I just couldn't buy into the premise of Severance and dislike a show about a shadowy corporation and "what are they *really* up to."
Pluribus, on the other hand, starts off with a cool "what would it be like if X happened?" and then runs some really interesting variants on it. I mean the loss of human dignity and all that is terrible, but isn't Mr. Diabate's reaction to his new situation rather enticing in its way? And while Manousos's unfaltering stand of resisting all assistance is admirable, isn't it, well, just a bit too much? (They don't want to be paid for the gas, dude!)
I just hope Gilligan doesn't reveal some sinister purpose behind the aliens. That would be deflating.
Severance really went off the rails when it started to be a mystery box show. Season 2 had some great episodes, but I worry the show is going into LOST territory.
Nah, they wrap it up pretty well.
The sinister purpose is that they forcibly take over everyone's consciousness and destroy individuals choice and agency while condemning every human to a slow painful death because of their own religious/philosophical commitments. As far as we know, the actual people could be trapped in their own bodies, watching the whole time as they and everyone they know die as slaves to an alien entity that cares nothing for them.
It's the plot of the whole show. You didn't think any of that was sinister?
I don't know. People seem perfectly happy joining MAGA and you are describing that to a T.
I’m pretty depressed about both options.
With Netflix you have a group of executives who don’t have any taste and despise the theatrical movie going experience. How many Netflix movies are forever movies? The Irishman and Marriage Story. Is there anymore? Warner alone released two this year in OBAA and Sinners. Ten years down the road we will see the most important studio in Hollywood releasing a few tentpole films a year in theaters and the rest will be slop for streaming.
With Paramount you have a group of executives who don’t have any taste (unless you only like Mission Impossible) and a right wing / foreign takeover of media properties. At least the theatrical experience will be saved? But at what cost to society.
I think Power of the Dog should have won the Oscar in that year.
I really liked Train Dreams.
Can’t wait to see it
OBAA was ... fine. I guess. But Lockjaw's character with the racist illuminati sub-plot was jarringly misplaced.
As someone who's more familiar with Marvel's cinematic oeuvre than I'd like to be, I was trying to figure out what Marvel content "OBAA" was that featured both the Inhuman Lockjaw and the Illuminati, let alone how the latter was portrayed as "racist" in anything possibly outside of X-Men content.
I think it spoke a lot to the moment we’re in. Which is remarkable for a film PTA has been working on for 20 years.
A movie that speaks a lot to the moment we're in is not likely to be a forever movie.
I haven't seen OBAA (I don't like PTA) and everyone talking about how it speaks to the current moment makes me less inclined to do so.
Casablanca spoke to the war we were in and is a forever movie. Great movies are about more than just one thing.
Eddington will be remembered as the better movie about the '20s. I expected to hate it, and really enjoyed it. One Battle After Another was as expected, a bit incoherent and silly, stepping on it's own feet a bit. Forgettable.
Ah, Eddington. Another movie I gave up on halfway through.
Maybe I'm the problem.
It's actually a good movie, which I did not expect given that it's ostensibly about contentious and polarizing political issues (this is actually just the backdrop).
Everyone is talking about affordability today, but I don't think anyone believes that either of these mergers is going to result in lower streaming prices. And outside of housing, it feels like we have managed to optimize "consumer welfare" all the way into an economy that everyone hates.
We are not going back to the Netflix era of 2010-2017 anyway, when Netflix seemingly had all the best, binge-able content for $10 a month. That was a product of ZIRP VC investment and other studios undervaluing their content libraries.
The 2025 Netflix content is far better than the 2020-2023 content by far.
Yeah, but in 2020-23, I could get discs from Netflix, which was a far, FAR larger catalog than their streaming service. (I genuinely struggle with whether to keep the streaming service.)
Well, even if Netflix will cost more once it has HBO’s content, it probably won’t cost as much as a Netflix subscription plus an HBO subscription do together now.
Netflix has a profit stream of X, and they're paying (a cash price) for a future profit stream of Y from HBO. Presumably if things go the Netflix executives' way, this will result in a future overall profit stream greater or equal to X+Y.
There are many ways to get there, but the most obvious top-level ideas are: (1) force existing Netflix+HBO customers to pay the same or higher price (combined) for the products, or (2) force millions of non-HBO Netflix customers to pay a slightly higher price (or vice versa) in exchange for new HBO content. I suppose this last idea could be a bonanza for some customers, who really wanted HBO content but were put off by the sticker price of HBO itself. My guess is that it will suck for other people who didn't want HBO, but will now pay for it anyway. The one thing I'm relatively convinced of is that less competition and choice will *not* result in people paying less for the services they really want.
Revenue ≠ profits.
Netflix is modeling $2.5-$3B of cost synergies out from the combined companies.
https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-to-acquire-warner-bros
My understanding is that $2.5-3bn is across the whole WB business (nearly $38bn yearly revenue), which is much larger than just the HBO streaming service I’m talking about here. So maybe 8% of revenue, and here we’re hoping these are real synergies and don’t come at the price of cutting content creation. So — and don’t pick on this number, it’s mostly a joke — that’s $0.88 saved if you apply it uniformly to the price of the ad-supported $10.99 tier of HBO.
Well, Y won't just come from HBO, but also from Warner, plus all that IP. So they don't necessarily have to charge the same combined price to get to X+Y. Of course, if that's what's most profitable, it's what they will do! I'm just not sure it will be, since the wide availability of free video (YouTube, etc.) is likely to put something of a ceiling on how much Netflix can profitably charge.
Antitrust enforcement is a bandwidth issue for the DOJ and FTC. There is plenty of anticompetitive behavior in the healthcare industry and a strong case could be made that the behavior is illegal. I don’t know all the details, but Netflix buying HBO doesn’t strike me as bad for the consumer.
Stopped the JetBlue Spirit merger and the supermarket merger. How did those workout?
I feel like I’m a little skeptical that this deal goes through and movie theaters are all Thanos snapped away replaced and demolished.
It seems like the likelier outcome is a smaller number of theaters, bad but not cataclysmic, possibly owned by the major studios conglomerates.
I went to see zootopia 2 at Disney springs and then went to dinner after and probably spent like over 200 dollars all told. What is AMC providing here?
My understanding is it’s currently illegal for studios to own theaters? Or something like that?
I believe that ended 2020, the old law was known as the “Paramount decree.”
This is a good opportunity for me to unfurl a take that has been very unpopular in almost all my social circles: I don't particularly enjoy the movie theater experience, so I'm not remotely bent out of shape about the potential Netflix deal threatening it.
I say this as someone who both loves movies and is deeply concerned about the general decline of in-person socializing in the wake of the streaming explosion, Covid, etc. So it's not that I don't like watching movies or getting together with people. I love doing both of those things.
I personally feel that at-home entertainment systems have reached the point where the theater is just not worth various costs. These include high ticket and concession prices, the fact that if you go to the bathroom you're going to miss some amount of the movie, the time-pressure of knowing you have to get to the theater early if you want good seats, the (in my opinion) somewhat claustrophobic seating arrangements, and whatever time and money expenses you incur on the trip to and from the theater.
If a movie is released on a streaming service, it's nearly impossible for me to think of a reason(s) I'd go to the theater to see it instead. I can invite people over to watch it on my affordable enormous TV, we can buy snacks at the market rate, and pause if/when we want to. It's just more pleasant to me.
All this to say, if the deal leads to increased production of high-quality films and TV shows and hastens the demise of the theater, well, I won't go as far as calling it a "win-win," out of respect for the majority of my friends who genuinely seem to enjoy the theater experience. I'll gently say instead that'd be a worthwhile tradeoff.
Movie theaters served an essential purpose when I was a teenager -- they gave us an opportunity to get together and get away from our parents. Teenagers don't seem nearly as anxious to get away from their parents these days, and they can watch movies at each other's houses, I suppose. I don't know if they do, though. Seems like they just watch them on their phones.
I don't know what kind of theater you go to but the theaters I've been to lately have downright enormous seats which are reserved so you don't have to get there early. And AMC now tells you the movies starts 25-30 minutes after the "showtime" so the previews are optional lol. It's true it is not an especially cheap night out though.
Interesting comment, Ted. Just out of curiosity, what is your last name? "Sarandos" by any chance?
:-)
Upon review of my checking account, I have determined that is not my last name :(
I’m just concerned for the welfare of Yakko, Wacko, and Dot in all of this.
I-understood-that-reference-Steve-Rogers.GIF
The Paramount bid doesn’t seem like a legitimate market transaction but an attempt at Trump gaining control—WBD has 5x the market cap of PSKY, shouldn’t they be the acquirers if there’s going to be a merger? So you kind of have to hope Netflix wins if that’s the alternative.
I still can’t believe Democrats didn’t even try to stop the Twitter takeover because they were too busy going after the Roomba acquisition and then affirmatively handed TikTok to Trump. If there’s a next Democratic administration they need to put a lot of thought into reversing the Trumpist media takeover which is surely worth way more points on the margin than any amount of moderation will get you.
It's the money behind Paramount that matters, and they have plenty of money