Netflix Buys Warner Bros. — Total Doom

So the big news today is that Netflix will acquire Warner Bros. and will now own all sorts of IP including Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, Batman and so much more.

Immediately, they wasted no time at all announcing "shortened theatrical release windows". In essence, they are aiming to kill movie theaters entirely.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/us-netflix-warner-bros-acquisition-9.7004170

This is going to put a tremendous amount of people out of work and lower wages across the industry just so that Netflix can increase subscriptions (and no doubt jack up the price further).

Why is this bad for you, as a composer? Well, the TV and Film industries remain the most lucrative path for composers between not only composer fees, but longtail royalty payments.

Even mid-tier indie films have the potential to pull in millions of dollars in revenue against tiny budgets at theaters. For example, at a film festival I recently attended, some of the films that had been short films in prior years went on to become multi-million dollar projects.

Simply put: Streaming means smaller budgets and as an individual film is no longer a product unto itself, especially not if you can only stream it on one service and not "rent" it like on Amazon Prime, the "profitability" of that film is essentially zero dollars now. Because everything is consolidated under one subscriber base. Even with hundreds of millions of subscribers, there is no way that this fixed income can be redistributed to fund anything resembling quality content in any sufficient amount.

That means lower pay, lower budgets, and even less room for risks and originality than what Hollywood is already starved of. 

Regardless of what you think of him, now would be the time for the orange man to do something about these growing monopolies, but what he'll probably just do is more tariffs.

Personally, I think this move is going to be a big, possibly final nail in the coffin of the American movie industry. The earning potential for everyone down to production assistants is going to plummet in the American movie industry, and I think you'll see all these people turning towards European and Asian markets. There will be even more creative brain-drain on North America than there already is.

Curious to know what you think about this?