In October, when Warner Bros Discovery hung a “For Sale” sign on itself, Hollywood was sad. The megaproducer Larry Gordon likened the feeling to a death in the family. In group WhatsApp chats, screenwriters used words like “heartbreaking” and “tragic”.

Now that a sale has been announced, with Netflix striking an $83 billion deal for the Warner Bros studio and its sibling streaming service, HBO Max, a different emotion is washing through the entertainment capital: Hollywood is mad.

Jane Fonda raged against a deal in a letter to an entertainment trade news publication, calling the end of a stand-alone Warner Bros “an alarming escalation in a consolidation crisis that threatens the entire entertainment industry, the public it serves and — potentially — the First Amendment itself”.

Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Cinema United, a trade organisation that represents 30,000 movie screens in the US, called the Netflix acquisition “an unprecedented threat” and vowed to fight it. “Theatres will close, communities will suffer, jobs will be lost,” O’Leary said, noting Netflix’s policy of giving movies only “token” releases in theatres. (Shares in publicly traded theatre chains, including AMC Entertainment, IMAX and Cinemark, fell as much as 8 per cent on Friday.)

“This merger must be blocked,” the Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 12,000 screenwriters, said in a statement. “The world’s largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent.” The Teamsters’ motion picture division also demanded that “all levels” of government “reject this deal”.

Netflix insisted on Friday that it would honour the Warner Bros business model — that it would continue to release movies in theatres for exclusive runs. “It’s not like we have this opposition to movies into theatres,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, said on a conference call with investors.

“Right now, you should count on everything that is planned on going to the theatre through Warner Bros” to “continue to go to theatres”, Sarandos added.

But many people in Hollywood viewed his comments with extreme scepticism. (“Key words: ‘right now’”, one agent said.) As recently as April, in response to a question at the Time100 Summit about declines at the overall box office, Sarandos said: “What is the consumer trying to tell us? That they’d like to watch movies at home.” He also called theatres “an outmoded idea” for most people.

Entertainment workers in Los Angeles — camera operators, producers, hairstylists, writers, actors, set designers, editors — have already been struggling with a contracting job market. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, two union strikes, an exodus of production to cheaper locales and the rise of artificial intelligence tools, tens of thousands of workers have been laid off by Hollywood companies since 2020.

So on Friday, there was a keen understanding that “consolidation” was just another word for “job loss”. It happened in 2019 when Disney bought 21st Century Fox assets from Rupert Murdoch for $71.3 billion. And it happened this year when Skydance Media, led by David Ellison, took over Paramount as part of an $8-billion merger. In October, Paramount began laying off more than 2,000 workers across its movie and television businesses to cut $3-billion in costs.

“Repeated consolidation in this industry has already cost so many film and television jobs, and any merger should be evaluated on its impacts on competition and employment,” Representative Laura Friedman, a Democrat whose Burbank congressional district includes many of Southern California’s major film institutions, said of the Netflix agreement. “I’ll be watching this deal closely to make sure it supports workers in L.A.”

“Los Angeles’s range of production studios contribute to its status as the shining creative capital of the world,” mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. “As Los Angeles continues fostering an environment that drives our signature industry, we will continue to boost local production and create more jobs and small-business opportunities right here at home.”

New York Times News Service