The case of the streaming giant Netflix taking over the famed Warner Bros Discovery, announced just on Friday, is already becoming curiouser and curiouser. First, President Trump said he might have to get involved and doubted whether the takeover would get the regulators’ nod. Then came Paramount this week, declaring a hostile takeover bid for Warner by offering a better deal than Netflix.
It is indeed a battle for the future of global entertainment and news content, exciting and frightening at the same time. From Hollywood to Bollywood, everyone has been fixated on this turmoil and for good reason. These developments could potentially trigger a seismic shift in the global entertainment industry.
Basics of Netflix’s offer
On Friday, Netflix announced a $72 billion agreement to acquire Warner Bros Discovery in a deal that would bring together the world’s largest streaming platform with one of the most powerful content libraries ever created. The proposed transaction, still subject to regulatory approval and the completion of Warner’s internal corporate split, would fold HBO, DC, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and vast studio assets into Netflix’s algorithm-driven empire, while spinning off Warner’s global networks, such as CNN, into a separate company.
If cleared, it would mark the most dramatic consolidation of the creative industry in modern entertainment history.
Paramount’s bid and the political undercurrents
Then on Monday, the ground shifted again. Paramount launched a stunning $108.4 billion hostile takeover bid for the entirety of Warner Bros Discovery, including its global networks business, going directly to shareholders and urging them to reject the Netflix deal. Paramount’s all-cash offer of $30 per share trumped Netflix’s mix of cash and stock. Additionally, Paramount promised what it called a faster and more certain path to completion, without regulatory nod easier to get.
With political undercurrents swirling in Washington, shareholder pressure rising and two radically different futures now on the horizon for Hollywood’s most storied studio, the battle for Warner Bros has suddenly become a contest over the very shape of the global entertainment industry.
What Netflix winning would mean for Hollywood and global entertainment
If the Netflix takeover of Warner Bros Discovery survives regulation, political pressure and a potential shareholder revolt, it would mark the most dramatic power shift in entertainment since television crushed cinema’s monopoly in the 1950s in the West.
Netflix would no longer be just a streaming giant. It will become a global content superpower, owning some of the most powerful film and television franchises ever created. HBO, DC, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Looney Tunes, The Matrix and Lord of the Rings and hundreds of films will be shown depending on what algorithms say, what the subscriber data suggest and what the platform logic is.
Effectively, it will mean the collapse of the old studio system into a single, vertically integrated global distributor-producer-superstudio.
Double-edged outcomes for Hollywood
For a struggling Hollywood, this will bring short-term stability and long-term fear. Stability because Netflix has cash, scale and an army of subscribers (over 30 crore worldwide, over one crore in India) that still pays every month. Fear because once the industry’s centre of gravity shifts to one dominant buyer, wage power will collapse.
The recent strikes in Hollywood were powered by exactly this anxiety. Who controls residuals in a streaming world. Who decides which stories get greenlit. Who dictates global release terms. A Netflix-Warner combine would quietly tilt all those levers further away from labour and towards platform power.
Netflix will be king as well as kingmaker.
What might happen in India
For India, the consequences would be even deeper. India is already Netflix’s most critical growth frontier. Subscriber growth in North America has plateaued. Europe is slowing. India is still expanding in scale, in mobile-first consumption and in regional language production.
A Netflix that owns Warner’s global franchises would have both premium Western IP and unlimited Indian production capacity under one roof. That creates a powerful but unequal relationship.
No doubt Indian studios, writers and actors would gain global visibility faster than ever. But they would also become structurally dependent on one gatekeeper. Pricing power, creative risk-taking and revenue sharing would increasingly be shaped in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, not Mumbai and Chennai.
Why monopoly anxiety is relevant
This is where the monopoly fear becomes real. A platform with more than 300 million subscribers and the deepest content vault in history would increasingly set industry norms.
Release windows, actor contracts, regional language budgets, dubbing priorities and even cultural themes could be quietly shaped by what performs best on one global dashboard.
Bollywood would not disappear. But its bargaining power would steadily decline. India could gain audiences but at what cost? It will certainly lose ownership
Ordinary subscribers like you and me will be happy at first, spoilt for choice. But hang on, you might soon have to shell out much more every month than you do now.
What a Paramount takeover would change
There is a clear sense that a Paramount takeover would reshape the industry very differently. Unlike Netflix, Paramount is not a pure platform empire. It is a legacy studio group. Paramount is in fact a major Hollywood studio and global media group that owns Paramount Pictures, CBS (TV network with news and sports), Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central and the Paramount+ streaming platform. But cinema is in its DNA.
If Paramount absorbs Warner Bros in full, including global networks like CNN, it would create a massive old-media supergroup rather than an algorithm-led content machine. We ought to know that cost-cutting would be brutal. Newsrooms would merge, so would the studios. Thousands of jobs would almost certainly go. But creative control would remain dispersed across multiple studios and divisions instead of collapsing into one platform brain.
And how will it affect India?
For India, a Paramount-controlled Warner or both entities combined, would be a far more familiar partner than a Netflix-controlled one. Paramount would still need Indian production to grow, but it would also remain tied to theatres, broadcasters and regional distributors.
That creates more room for hybrid models. Cinema plus streaming. TV plus digital. It keeps multiple windows alive. Indian producers would have more negotiating room because content would still need to perform in different ecosystems, not just on one streaming dashboard. In creative terms, this protects diversity better than a single-platform world.
I think for Bollywood studios as well as the studios in the South the Paramount-led bid would be more palatable.
Who faces the bigger regulatory challenges?
Netflix faces bigger challenges. A Netflix-Warner merger directly raises monopoly concerns at a scale that regulators cannot ignore. President Donald Trump’s public signalling already shows that this deal has become politically sensitive. We know that Big Tech distrust is bipartisan, therefore, this merger will be examined not just by economists but by lawmakers looking for problems in the deal
On the regulatory front, both deals will face scrutiny. A Netflix monopoly alarms digital regulators. A Paramount-Warner combine alarms traditional competition authorities because of studio dominance.
(Syed Zubair Ahmed is a London-based journalist of Indian origin with over 30 years of experience in the Western media.)
Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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