By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
The bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery is over, and it looks like Paramount has emerged as the victor. Netflix has dropped its bid for the century-old studio and production company, and it is now in the hands of Paramount Skydance. This news has rocked the entertainment industry and sparked speculation about the future of Warner Bros. properties, including HBO, CNN, and the DC Comics cinematic universe, which includes Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman among its famous superheroes.
The sale of the Warner Brothers movie collection has been a hot-button issue for those who watch the entertainment industry. Netflix announced that it dropped its bid to acquire the catalog, leaving Paramount as the winning bid. It cost Paramount Skydance Studios an estimated $111 billion to secure a catalog going back more than a century.
Netflix was counting on Warner Bros.’s history of success in the entertainment industry to boost its own catalogue, given its relative newcomer status in movie production and distribution. So was Paramount, which made a bid for the floundering studio and its assets in September 2025. Warner Bros. formally rejected this offer in October, which enabled both Comcast and Netflix to make their own bid.
Eventually, Comcast dropped out, and as far as anyone could tell, only Netflix was a viable player on the field with an offer approaching $82.7 billion. This rankled WBD stockholder Ancora Alternatives LLC, which held out its vote on February 11, 2026, on the grounds that Paramount’s complaints of favoritism toward Netflix were true. This reopened the bidding and allowed Paramount until February 23, 2026, to make a qualifying “superior offer” for Warner Bros.
Netflix had three days to make a counteroffer and announced on February 26, 2026, that it would not do so.
The entire deal has been covered in controversy. For a few years, Warner Bros. has been writing off properties for tax purposes, including entire movies and television shows. This included digital properties people had purchased for themselves that suddenly disappeared from their libraries with no explanation. These tax write-offs were also an indication of how much trouble the company was in.
Paramount’s move to make its initial bid was seen as an attempt at a hostile takeover. Warner Bros. and Paramount have been competitors for over a century. Combining their libraries puts a significant amount of cinematic and television history under one umbrella. A successful Netflix bid would have given Netflix the lion’s share of the streaming market, as it currently controls over 19% while Paramount and Warner Bros. each control almost 11%. As it stands, Paramount is poised to control more of the market than Netflix and would be second only to Disney+ and its streaming partners, Hulu and Fubo.
Warner Bros. and Paramount also own several news services between them, including CNN and CBS. CBS News has been under fire of its own after the ascension of Bari Weiss as news editor. Social media has been abuzz with viewers who are wary of Weiss potentially controlling CNN because they think she is too friendly to President Trump in her editorial decisions. This is despite Weiss being a centrist who has been critical of Trump in her previous work.
Another issue is the potential for reducing access to media that is already seeing increased siloing of content. Entertainment companies push out their own apps or merge with other companies to consolidate their smaller catalogs, as the union of Paramount and Warner Bros. is about to do. The Paramount Plus app is notoriously buggy and even failed for some users during the Survivor 50 premiere on Wednesday, February 25. Paramount already excludes much of its content produced before the 1980s, and obtaining a long-standing rival’s library could mean the Warner Bros. and HBO collections get the same treatment.
Finally, there is the issue of Paramount practically destroying its own properties. Starfleet Academy has been criticized for poor writing, the destruction of Star Trek lore, and gratuitous inclusion in places where such inclusion makes no sense. Coupled with the trajectory of programs like Survivor, the NCIS and CSI franchises, and endless reboots of Matlock, Hawaii Five-O, and MacGuyver, signs show that the entertainment division is heading in a direction that asks serious questions about what will become of Warner Bros. properties like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter series, and the DC Universe, among others. HBO Max runs numerous classic Akira Kurosawa movies, like The Hidden Fortress and Rashomon: what will become of them under Paramount’s supervision?
Now that the deal is finalized, the next step is to examine it for any antitrust issues it raises. This will require scrutiny from numerous governments besides the United States, because every country Paramount wants to do business in has a certain amount of input in the proceedings.
Neither Netflix nor Paramount should have been able to buy Warner Bros. All the players involved, including Comcast, represent significant portions of the American and foreign streaming markets, as well as entertainment and news media. It shrinks the pool of major entertainment companies to a mere four.
Now, if the deal passes muster with anti-trust laws, two of the oldest studios in Hollywood are about to join forces, for better or for worse.
Heated Rivalry‘s Connor Storrie is hosting SNL this Saturday, and in the clip above he takes on the time-honored tradition of filming a series of increasingly silly promo videos with a cast member (in this case Sarah Sherman) and the musical guest (Mumford & Sons).
There are an unsurprisingly large number of jokes about Heated Rivalry from Sherman, capped off by a bit in which the two pretend to make out with each other — and the entirety of Mumford & Sons get involved too.
Elsewhere, be sure to check out Storrie’s undeniably impressive range of accents.
500 months or so?
Michelle Rial is the author and illustrator of the forthcoming picture book Charts for Babies. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, WIRED, and more. She is the mom to one baby (ahem — toddler).
P.S. Questions I’ve asked after having a baby, and March ladies.
By Nina Phillips
| Published
One of the most popular TV adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyal’s Sherlock Holmes series is available to stream on Hulu and Disney+. The modern version of this story grew popular with many fans over its four seasons.
The 2010 Sherlock series follows a consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes in modern London. He helps police solve crimes with his flatmate, Dr. John Watson. Overall, the show follows a very similar story to the original Sherlock Holmes novels but is set in a more modern time.
Stephen Moffat (Doctor Who) and Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen) worked together to create this version of Sherlock. The cast was impressive as well, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes (Doctor Strange) and Martin Freeman (The Hobbit) as John Watson. Additional cast members include Rupert Graves (V for Vendetta), Una Stubbs (Till Death Us Do Part), Jonathan Aris (Vivarium), and Lara Pulver (The Split).
Sherlock was interesting in the way it presented itself. Though it was a TV series, each season was made up of only three episodes that ran for approximately 90 minutes. This meant that each season was more like a trio of movies than an actual series.
Because of how long each episode was, and the fact that the directors were working on several shows at once, seasons took a fair amount of time to come out. Season 1 came out in 2010, Season 2 in 2012, Season 3 in 2014, and Season 4 came out in 2017.
Upon release, Sherlock did well, especially in the first two seasons. According to IMDb ratings, it has an average rating of 9.1 out of 10.
When it comes to modern Sherlock Holmes adaptations, Sherlock is considered one of the best. There’s a lot to like about this four-series show. The main villain, Moriarty, was played by an amazing actor, Andrew Scott (Spectre). Additionally, the story is easy to follow and has a fast pace.
However, it’s not always seen as the best modern Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation. That award is sometimes given to Elementary. This seven-season show focused more on the human side of Sherlock and the people in his life than on the actual drama and crime. Johnny Lee Miller (Aeon Flux) plays Sherlock, while Watson is played by Lucy Liu (Kill Bill).
The reviews on Rotten Tomatoes support this. Where Sherlock earned a critic score of 78 percent and an audience score of 83 percent, Elementary had a critic score of 95 percent and an audience score of 89 percent.
Part of the problem was that while the first two seasons were rather good, Sherlock declined in the last two. The show shifted away from the crimes to focus more on character development, and the writers also added crazy and far-reaching twists, such as Watson’s partner. While Sherlock started to fall flat, Elementary remained a good show throughout all of its seasons.
Sherlock is available on Hulu and Disney+.
