Warner Bros.’ eleven Oscars win as Paramount takeover looms

And the winner is Warner Bros. At least the place the just-concluded Oscars ceremony is anxious. The studio based in 1923 by the brothers Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner (sure, there have been really 4 Warner brothers) had 30 nominations this yr, of which it has received 11 Oscars. What occurs after this, nevertheless, is a priority for some in Hollywood.

Warner Bros. Discovery, the father or mother firm of Warner Bros. studio, has a $110 billion takeover provide from Paramount and Skydance. The deal must be accredited by the U.S. authorities authorities because it might create an enormous monopoly. Until not too long ago, streaming large Netflix was within the bid too, for $82.7 billion.

Many observers really feel that the deal might undergo later this yr since the 2025-established Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, 43, and his father Larry, the founding father of Oracle Corporation, are near U.S. President Donald Trump. They are additionally large monetary supporters of Israel.

The drama unfolds

Warner Bros. Discovery studio has a takeover provide from Paramount Skydance for $110 billion.
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Paramount had some large successes in 2025, from Tom Cruise-led Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, which grossed $600 million, to The Naked Gun franchise’s newest reboot starring Liam Neeson ($102 million international box-office), which had a terrific second innings on Amazon Prime. “I think Paramount’s goal is to be the biggest movie studio out there,” says Gitesh Pandya, editor of BoxOfficeGuru.com, and a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which supplies out the Academy Awards (Oscars). The different large studios that outline the Hollywood terrain are The Walt Disney Company, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, and Amazon MGM Studios — a brand new entity after Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Studios purchased MGM in 2022.

“Adding Warner Bros. automatically makes Paramount bigger,” Pandya observes. “Their library is bigger. They have more franchises.” Over the years, Warner Bros. Discovery has acquired many necessary media property, together with HBO Max, CNN, Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies. Other jewels in its treasury embrace DC Comics, Harry Potter, F.R.I.E.N.D.S., Game of Thrones, and so on. Paramount Skydance hopes to consolidate all of this wealth beneath its belt. With the merger, Paramount would have the ability to add HBO Max’s 132 million worldwide subscribers to the 80 million who’re members of the Paramount+ streaming service. This would place Paramount on higher aggressive floor with Netflix, which has over 325 million international subscribers.

But there are apparent darker facets of an enormous merger of this sort. It will certainly lead to job losses. “Movie studios, streaming services and television are similar businesses,” Pandya says. “There are a lot of divisions that overlap. Some people will end up getting laid off.” At the Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty, actress-activist Jane Fonda, 88, sported a pin with the textual content ‘Block the Merger’.

Protests towards the Paramount-Warner Bros Merger by way of a billboard truck circling the Oscars on March 13, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.
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The merger drama began precisely a yr in the past. Warner Bros. studio heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy had been seemingly in hassle after a number of box-office failures, together with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), and Korean grasp Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (2025). Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was contemplating changing De Luca and Abdy.

But spring 2025 overturned De Luca’s and Abdy’s fortunes as they launched one hit after one other, beginning with A Minecraft Movie. Based on the 2011 online game, the movie had a built-in viewers similar to that of Barbie (2023), in line with Pandya. The movie exceeded all expectations, grossing $961 million worldwide, in line with film-revenue-tracking web site Box Office Mojo.

A nonetheless from Warner Bros. produced Sinners, which received 4 Oscars this yr.

A nonetheless from Warner Bros. produced One Battle After Another, which received six Oscars this yr.

This was adopted by F1: The Movie ($633 million), an Apple TV manufacturing distributed by Warner Bros.; Superman ($619 million); The Conjuring: Last Rites ($499 million); Sinners ($370 million) — which grew to become a favorite of audiences and critics; and The Final Destination Bloodlines ($317 million). Even final week’s Oscar Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another, a critically acclaimed status movie, ended up grossing over $210 million (it’s one other matter that owing to its excessive manufacturing prices, it was thought of a box-office failure).

Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chairs and CEOs Michael De Luca (left) and Pamela Abdy.
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With a banner yr, Warner Bros. Discovery was thought of scorching property and suitors lined as much as purchase the large Hollywood conglomerate. But with Paramount within the image, Netflix walked away from the bid, albeit with a small profit — a $2.8 billion payoff from Paramount.

Theatres versus streaming

Netflix’s provide scared many in Hollywood. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has usually expressed his aversion to theatrical releases and would a lot fairly carry movies on to his streaming platform. Last yr on the Time100 summit, Sarandos stated the theatre mannequin was “outdated”. “Theatres are not their business model,” Pandya says about Netflix. “Their business is streaming, and they want all content to go to streaming first. Many years ago, they started with DVD rentals of movies, but now everything is streaming — films, shows, live events, sports, boxing matches, concerts.”

(L-R) David Zaslav, CEO, Warner Bros. Discovery and Ted Sarandos, CEO, Netflix on the AFI Awards final yr in LA.
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Filmmaker-actor Shekhar Kapur believes the Hollywood panorama is altering. “I remember a top Hollywood studio head telling me, ‘We don’t do drama’,” Kapur says. “I thought, what is storytelling without drama?” Of course, by drama he means dramatic storytelling.

“The best writers and storytellers have moved to OTT,” he says. “There’s a concern in Hollywood that Netflix is the killer of theatrical releases. I don’t think so. Theatrical films have moved towards ‘ride’ movies or Marvel tentpole films where popcorn sales are high.”

During the negotiations with Warner, Sarandos did say that Netflix would honour a 45-day unique run window for movies to display in theatres earlier than they got here to the streaming service. In latest years, they launched the second and third elements of the Knives Out franchise movies in theatres, though only for a few weeks. Even Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein first received a restricted theatrical launch, maybe as a result of the movie had the potential for numerous Oscar nominations. Or it was simply that Sarandos needed to maintain an Oscar-winning director of Del Toro’s stature blissful.

Will the merger affect India?

Had the Netflix-Warner Bros. Discovery deal gone by way of, it could have benefitted the streamer’s subscribers outdoors the U.S. — together with in India. In India, we had been capable of watch Frankenstein and Wake Up Dead Man (Knives Out: Part 3) the identical time it grew to become accessible to U.S. Netflix members. In comparability, Marty Supreme, a movie that carried big Oscar buzz, opened in Indian theatres one month after its U.S. launch. Hamnet, which received Jessie Buckley the Best Actress Oscar, had a small launch in India virtually two months after it performed within the U.S. theatres.

The theatre versus direct-to-streaming platform tussle will definitely create an upheaval in how we devour movies. In 2021, as the pandemic saved folks away from theatres, Warner Bros. got here up with the plan to concurrently launch movies in theatres and on HBO Max for home-viewing. It appeared like a good suggestion then, besides it resulted in piracy, irking filmmakers who weren’t consulted earlier than the transfer. Christopher Nolan referred to as HBO Max “the worst streaming service”. In September 2021, an indignant Nolan left Warner Bros. for Universal. And Denis Villeneuve whose Dune: Part One (2021) was one of many movies that had a simultaneous theatrical and streaming launch stated that it confirmed “absolutely no love for cinema.” 

The merger will hardly have any implications on the Indian market, in line with Siddharth Roy Kapur, founding father of Roy Kapur Films and former managing director of Walt Disney Company India. “These players really are distributors of their Hollywood content in India, rather than local producers. As far as I know, they are still going to be releasing their movies theatrically.”

“The movies that work in India are the superhero franchises, the disaster features with some sense of scale and spectacle,” Roy Kapur continues. “And those films, by both Paramount and Warner, will continue to be produced.” Consolidations and mergers of studios are by no means excellent news for artistic folks, Roy Kapur agrees. “But these studios aren’t producing locally in India.” The first main Bollywood manufacturing of Warner Bros. was Nikkhil Advani’s Chandni Chowk to China (2009) however that experiment didn’t go down nicely on the field workplace, and whereas in addition they co-produced Manoj Bajpayee-starrer Dus Tola (2010), Warner Bros. had scaled again its manufacturing efforts in India.

Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha (2022) was collectively co-produced by Paramount Pictures, Aamir Khan Productions and Viacom18 Studios. The movie carried out poorly, incomes solely $15 million globally. Occasionally, Paramount distributes Indian movies, together with Padmaavat (2018).

Currently, each Paramount and Warner stream their exhibits and movies on JioHotstar in India. These embrace the Mission Impossible movies (Paramount) and a spread of HBO exhibits such at Sopranos, Game of Throne and Succession (all Warner).

The politics of management

David Ellison has promised to maintain the 2 studios — Paramount and Warner Bros. — as separate entities, and every will produce roughly 15 movies per yr. Amid worries amongst observers, fashionable movie weblog FirstShowing.web editor-critic Alex Billington chooses to remain “optimistic”. He says, “I don’t think it’s going to kill Hollywood, but I do think the consolidation is not going to result in the benefits that we [filmgoers] want.” He can be not satisfied in regards to the timing of the deal. “If you had told me this five years ago, I’d have said, ‘Okay, Warner Bros. is in trouble’. But now the studio is doing so good, and they still want to sell off? I don’t get it.”

Billington remembers when Disney purchased twentieth Century Fox in 2019 for $71 billion, rebranding the studio and shedding the ‘Fox’ title. “Disney said we will let them do whatever they have been doing, and then all of a sudden, they went from 14-15 movies to like five per year that were theatrically released.” And for the reason that merger, Fox Searchlight, the speciality wing of 20^th Century Fox that gave us Oscar-winning movies such as Slumdog Millionaire (2008), 12 Years of a Slave (2013), Birdman (2014) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) has had only a few theatrical releases. Most of the Searchlight movies are actually “dumped” on Disney’s streaming service Hulu, provides Billington.

Roy Kapur believes in Paramount’s intentions of manufacturing roughly 30 movies per yr. “But then, when corporate efficiencies get into play and a certain amount of streamlining happens, then you see the output dropping,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t. Because it’s great for the creative community to have these strong studios independent of each other.”

Producer David Ellison on the premiere of the Tom Cruise-starrer Top Gun: Maverick (2022).
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Jane Fonda who was married to the late Ted Turner, founding father of CNN, additionally stated the merger would lead to political management over the information channel. “That’s why [U.S. defence secretary Pete] Hegseth said, ‘CNN can’t come soon enough’ to be under the control of Paramount.”

A latest The New York Times podcast, too, advised that Ellison desires to purchase all of the Warner Bros. Discovery properties so as to manage and alter the political opinions expressed on CNN. The information channel is President Trump’s least favorite outlet, and he usually refers to it as “fake news”. Paramount Skydance has accomplished the identical with the CBS channel, cancelling Stephen Colbert’s fashionable The Late Show. The transfer was seen by many as a method to curb the anti-Trump chatter on Colbert’s present.

Meanwhile, Larry Ellison has been actively creating a brand new Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure at Oracle. When it involves getting access to information within the type of movie, information and social media, with the hope of coaching AI fashions, Warner’s massive library might turn out to be useful.

How the deal pans out, one has to attend and watch. The bigger Paramount-Warner studio would need to stability large money-earning franchises with critically acclaimed, award-worthy dramas. But Warner Bros.’ profitable streak on the field workplace ought to proceed by way of 2026. Its subsequent DC Studios franchise movie Supergirl opens this summer time, and Dune: Part 3 is nicely timed for the Christmas holidays.

The author is a movie pageant programmer and writer.