Duncan Greive: Is the new Warner Bros-Netflix deal putting cinemas at risk?

Netflix is set to acquire Warner Bros Studios in a Netflix agrees to acquire Warner Bros Studios in a $125B deal including HBO Max. 

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has said theatrical releases will become more limited, as Netflix sees them as not 'consumer friendly'.

Media commentator Duncan Greive told Ryan Bridge: "historically, Netflix has been at best tepid, probably more accurately hostile, towards movie theatres."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Sky TV shares been a bit all over the place today,
but wobly this after the Netflix Warner Bros. Deals announced
at the weekend. It still needs regulatory approval and Trump
has said some stuff on this today. We'll bring that
to you shortly. But it affects Sky in New Zealand
because a lot of the movies and the TV shows
on Neon Sky's streaming service come from HBO, which Warner

(00:21):
Brothers owns. Duncan Grieve is host of the Full Media
podcast on the spin Off and joins me this afternoon. Hey,
Duncan there right, how are you got to thank you?
How much of what Neon puts out comes from HBO
comes from Warner Brothers.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
I think it's I'm not sure about the precise percentage,
but certainly when you think about how Neon markets itself,
For example, it tends to build its campaigns around a
few ten pole shows, the likes of The White Lotus
or The Last of Us, and both of those are
HBO shows, And typically it's biggest marketing pushes about really

(00:58):
high quality shows that that show up on a weekly basis.
Keep you hooked on Neon from HBO and the richest,
most kind of beloved parts of its library are also
from HBO. So the idea of the value proposition of
Neon as a you know, as a consumer product being

(01:21):
retained without HBO is pretty sketchy to me.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
It's the good bits. Would do you have Neon? Duncan?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
I do? I think I'd probably watch it more than
any other streaming service without.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
The HBO content. Would you still have the subscription?

Speaker 2 (01:39):
I mean, I'm a media junkie, so I think I'm
a bit of an outlier, but I certainly wouldn't. I
think it would plummet in my rankings to to like,
you know, third or fourth most used. And then for
the average person, that's a very easy cancel with cinema.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Will you know, does everything just then go to net?
If the deal goes through, does everything then just go
to Netflix and forget about the movies?

Speaker 2 (02:05):
I mean, historically Netflix has been pretty at best tipped,
probably more accurately hostile towards movie theaters. It's not a
business at they're end. They very occasionally will release something
for a very limited couple of weeks run basically to
make it eligible for the Oscars. But they've always been
very pure and kind of precise with what they are

(02:28):
as a company, which is a single app that you
can watch on any device and works incredibly well. And
they just think, more great content, more customers. That's a
flywheel that keeps rolling. And that's a big part of
what's scaring people with this acquisition is that the studio
that had the best year by far at the global
box office was one of Brothers Discovery, and you know,

(02:52):
they represent fifteen percent of the sort of cinematic market
at the moment, and if you kind of pull that out,
you know a lot of locations and potentially even some
some chains of theaters aren't viable and the whole enterprise
starts to look a bit shaky. Now, Netflix have said
that they're not planning to pull the movies out of
there right now, and it would be hard from our

(03:14):
financial perspective to do so. But you've got to think
medium long term. They want to have all this stuff
on Netflix and potentially on Netflix exclusively.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
One hundred percent. Don't appreciate that. Sathnoon, Thank you. Dunk
and Graeve, host of the Fold Media podcast on the spinoff.
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