Dec 11, 2025
by Purpose Foundation
Couch or cinema? Netflix or movie theater? Do you still love watching your favourite films on the big screen?
If so, you might be flinching at the latest news from Hollywood just like we are: Netflix, the world’s leading streaming platform, is on the verge of buying the legendary Warner Bros. And with the studio comes HBO, one of Netflix’s biggest competitors in the streaming business. American media reported a shockwave rolling through Hollywood: fears about jobs, about movie theaters, about healthy competition in the film industry. And to top it all, Paramount – a competitor of Warner and close to US president Donald Trump – has now placed its own bid.
Famous actress Jane Fonda wrote on The Ankler: “The threat of this merger in any form is an alarming escalation in a consolidation crisis that threatens the entire entertainment industry, the public it serves, and — potentially — the First Amendment itself.”
Admittedly, Hollywood has always been a commercial machine. And since the “Golden Age” (Hollywood’s rise in the 1920s throughout the 50s), the major studios of the time, known as “The Big Five”, were accused of exploiting their market power. Back then, they started what became known as vertical integration, i.e. expanding the business into distribution, marketing, and other fields. However, at least there were The Big Five, and also the “Little Three”, each independent and competing with one another.
Today, not a single major studio is truly independent anymore. The market power of digital corporations has long since become a reality here as well. Just a few years ago, Amazon swallowed MGM, one of the old Hollywood giants. And now the takeover thriller surrounding Warner Bros.
What does this news trigger in you? Is this just a logical consequence because cinema is supposedly dying anyway? Or a dangerous centralization of power? And what about press freedom? After all, the Warner Bros. group also includes networks like CNN. That’s probably one reason Trump is pushing so hard for Paramount – a company friendly to him – to win the bid instead of Netflix. One might wonder what his motives are. By the way, Paramount is no longer independent either: it was recently bought by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is considered the second-richest person in the world and who supported Trump during the campaign.
Netflix, for its part, has never made a secret of seeing itself as competition to the cinema. Its business model is about keeping people on the screen for as long as possible. Every minute spent there – and not in a theater – pays off. Algorithms now play a major role in shaping how a story is built and told. Only in April, Netflix’s Co-CEO Ted Sarandos, said according to the New York Times: “What is the consumer trying to tell us? That they’d like to watch movies at home.” Theaters were “an outmoded idea” for most people, he added.
So what now? Once again, we think: let’s talk about ownership!
Because: While everyone is discussing who is buying whom and who owns what, no one is asking why any of this is even possible in the first place. So let’s talk about the underlying structures. About ownership. And about how healthy it is to build mega-corporations with quasi-monopolistic market power, corporations you simply can’t get around, companies that buy up their competitors for shareholder-value motives, in a world where corporations become speculative assets, with everything that entails.
Steward-ownership offers another answer. It keeps companies independent in the long term – on a legally binding basis. They cannot become speculative assets. The focus can never be on short-term profit maximization but must always remain on the company’s purpose and development. All of this is embedded in the DNA of ownership.
If we dare dream a little (because we know reality is far from this, but aren't films made of dreams?): If Warner Bros. was steward-owned, it could not simply be sold to the highest bidder to further expand that bidder’s market power. Control over the company would never be for sale.
Then we could sit in the cinema – or in front of our screen at home – without that uneasy feeling. Because let’s be clear: streaming, of course, can also be fun.
Are you curious to learn more about the details behind this story? Then read on in in-depth blog post on the Netflix-Warner-story ...