Fin: Paramount gets WBD! Five reasons to worry, and five reasons not to
Plus, Riverbend returns, Roman Polanski’s greatest crime, the BAFTA Tourette’s incident and more in this week’s notes column.
It’s official: Netflix announced Thursday that it is dropping its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, leaving Paramount Skydance as the only remaining bidder.
It’s not a 100 percent done deal yet, as regulatory approval remains, in both the U.S. and Europe, while the California attorney general is also threatening to block the deal. But it’s looking very likely that Paramount and Warner Bros., two studios that go back to the dawn of Hollywood, will now be combined.
My thoughts:
Overall, this is not the outcome I wanted. Consolidation of the movie business is bad, and a Paramount purchase of Warner Bros. would involve a ton of debt, and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. Ellison has promised 20 movies a year from the two studios, but who knows if that ends up coming to pass.
What would the ideal outcome have been? Almost certainly, no Warner sale at all.
David Ellison is more Trump-curious than I would prefer for the main owner of a movie studio, although I’ve never expected the owners or heads of movie studios to be good or admirable people, as they never really have been. It’s just that I’m not convinced, from his record so far, either with Skydance or Paramount, that he’s a competent or effective movie studio boss.
There were reasons to worry about the prospect of a Netflix-owned Warner Bros., including its commitment to theatrical distribution. But Ted Sarandos and Co. are, and always have been, in the movie business, which is more than I can say for the Ellisons. Warner Bros, in 2025, had one of the best years a studio has ever had, complete with two of the best movies of the year, both singular, original visions by great filmmakers, and those two films will likely split the major Oscars next month. Does David Ellison have the wherewithal to oversee another year like that?
I’m very worried about CNN, and what will become of it. I just watched Call Me Ted, the six-part documentary series from a couple of years ago about the life and career of Ted Turner, who, among many other things, was the founder of CNN. Turner was an imperfect man in many ways, but he was a billionaire owner who invested in journalism, did revolutionary things with the form, and backed his reporters. Will David Ellison do any of those things?
On the other hand…
I’m not exactly concerned that Paramount is going to make, like, only right-wing movies. Rupert Murdoch owned the Fox movie studio for more than 30 years, and he never really did that. In the event of a completed merger, I’m expecting the studios’ output to become more middlebrow, safer, and more IP and franchise-dependent, but I don’t expect Paramount/WB to turn into Angel Studios.
Worried as I am about CNN, I’m less worried about Bari Weiss taking control of CNN, simply because her stewardship of CBS has clearly not worked, and I doubt she’ll even still be running CBS by the time the Paramount/Warner deal closes. I don’t doubt CNN will be run by some hack, but I’m just not sure it’ll be Bari.
I’m also less worried about HBO, because HBO’s parent company has had a lot of owners over the years, from AOL to AT&T, who haven’t been able to screw it up, so I’m not so sure Paramount will do that either. Also, strangely, this puts HBO and Showtime under the same umbrella, although the Showtime brand barely exists at this point.
Notice no one cares about the new entity’s stewardship of the Discovery assets, because none of them have any type of legacy of excellence or integrity. What will the sale mean for the future of Dr. Pimple Popper?
If Netflix had bought WDB, the Snyderverse would not have been restored. If Paramount buys it… the Snyderverse will not be restored.
Much more on this, I’m sure, as the story develops.
‘Riverbend,’ revived
This week, I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer about Riverbend, a long-lost film from 1989 about a trio of Black Vietnam veterans leading an uprising against a racist Southern sheriff in 1966 Georgia.
Directed by Sam Firstenberg, the auteur behind Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Riverbend barely got a release in 1989, but Michael Dennis of Reelblack supervised a restoration of the film.
It took many years, and several steps, from the discovery on eBay of a print from South Africa to the sourcing of the actual negative, but the restoration was finally completed, and had its first paid public screening last night at PFS East here in Philly, with the director and a few of the actors on hand.
Mike’s Reelblack has been a few different things over the years, from a production company to a screening series to a YouTube channel, hosting all sorts of content, from film analysis to his hours of interviews with Dick Gregory. Now, the launch of the restoration, through his new label ReelBlack Renaissance, Mike tells me he’s getting the itch to host screenings again.
You can contribute to the Kickstarter for the project and order the Blu-ray in the process, here.
