Entertainment
Warner Bros. Has A New Owner, And It Isn't Netflix
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.
Three Bidders Enter, One Bidder Leaves
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.
Warner Bros Has Been A Tax Write Off For Years
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.
More Content Silos In Our Future?
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.
Paramount’s Destruction Of Beloved Properties
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.