The cliché of the moment is that Hollywood could not have scripted the bid battle for Warner Bros Discovery. In fact, Hollywood has a long history of writing and shooting movies and TV series about itself, from Sunset Boulevard to Seth Rogen’s The Studio. The question, though, is whether either of the rival bidders, Netflix and Paramount Skydance, will leave behind enough writers to prepare a future screenplay.
The bids could unleash more disruption on Hollywood’s “creatives” — directors, producers, writers, actors and crew — and the wider movie-theatre sector. “There is no preferred winner,” Michele Mulroney, president of the Writers Guild of America West, said this week. “Our belief here is that whoever wins, writers lose.”
This is another violent aftershock for the industry following the seismic interruption of Covid-19, which drove viewers into the arms of streamers such as Netflix. Then came the writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023, competition from alternative entertainment sources such as YouTube, and the tectonic shift triggered by generative artificial intelligence.