Peter Bart: The Warner War Catches Hollywood By Surprise … Again
The Warner War is only a month or so old with Hollywood fervently trying to compute who will be the true winners or losers. The rhetoric of corporate turf wars always sounds transformative — until it isn’t.
Highflying Netflix at this moment has been on a buying spree of scripts and novels. Viewers hope that its third acts will be more definitive than Hollywood’s power plays.
Filmmakers and filmgoers remember when Warners’ Steve Ross a generation ago assembled movies, music, magazines and other media into an entity that was “too big to fail.” It imploded.
Hollywood presently fears that the billions waved by Netflix and the Ellisons might translate into fewer jobs, higher subscriber fees and movie theater closings. Further, production may stall while competing regulatory bodies in Washington and Europe play out their bureaucratic rituals.
Then come incidental questions: Will CNN or CBS News become politicized toys? Further, if Middle East royalty ends up with a major studio stake, would their demands comprise more than a red carpet screening of Bugonia?
Netflix executives vigorously stand behind their $82.7 billion offer as “a win for the entertainment industry — a victory for growth.” Paramount’s bid is $108 billion. The Netflix offer covers the Warner Bros studio and HBO Max, with Warner retaining its cable networks, CNN and TNT.
But Hollywood veterans point out this irony: While previous turf wars had been triggered by internal disruptions or even collapse, the Hollywood of mid-2025 had been showing hints of renewed health when hostilities broke out. This marked a sharp contrast to the time of Ross takeovers or even the studio revolution of the mid-1960s — one prompted by total financial disarray. Every studio was essentially broke.
Jack Warner set off the ’60s upheavals by abruptly selling his family fiefdom to an unknown entity named Kinney. That prompted for-sale signs at Paramount, Fox, MGM and United Artists. Even Universal’s stolid Lew Wasserman was suddenly looking for buyers and firing existing staff.
I had an inside seat for the resulting disarray. I had just signed on at Paramount, a studio supposedly flush with cash, when the bankers suddenly raised a red flag: All new spending would stop.
The shut-off was a challenge for its studio management: Bob Evans had just greenlit a reshoot of Love Story and I had just optioned an unfinished novel called The Godfather.
Just as suddenly, the clouds would soon part. Every studio was back in business, struggling on reduced budgets and new management — John Calley at Warner, Ned Tanen at Universal, Dick Zanuck at Fox and the newcomers at Paramount. The hungry new teams nurtured a bold genre of filmmaking, young management betting on young talent.
There had, of course, been earlier historic turnarounds in Hollywood’s checkered past dating to the talkies in the 1920s and the New Deal-inspired revival of the 1930s. Hollywood’s intoxication with mega-budget blockbusters in the ’80s would plunge Hollywood into massive debt until the subsequent explosion of video helped rationalize the overspending. Then a new entity clumsily named Netflix intruded with its quantum equation.
Along the way, Hollywood consistently displayed its multi-generational habit of being caught by surprise — arguably a reminder that, in the end, it was all about show business. Hence companies are feuding over ownership of a movie studio at a moment when the residual Oscar audience will be encouraged to shift to YouTube.
