Netflix wants Warner

Translated by Silvia Toro

This is not about offers, but about power. There is one word that keeps coming up in the corridors of the global audiovisual industry: Focus. It is this dynamic—the accumulation of catalogs, rights, and distribution control—that makes the possibility of Netflix acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery credible today, a scenario that until recently would have been dismissed as financial science fiction and is now being treated as a possible outcome.

The deal is no longer just a theoretical market exercise. On December 5, Reuters revealed that Netflix's $72 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery's studio and streaming assets has already sparked a heated political debate in Washington, with Democratic and Republican lawmakers openly talking about an “antitrust nightmare.” In US institutional lexicon, this expression express a level of alarm far greater than the normal dialectic between regulators and large companies.

It is this same change in perspective that also makes the arrival of HBO Max in Italy, scheduled for January 13 next year, a reality. This is not just a new logo to add to the app screen, but a shift that affects who controls content, who decides what remains visible and what disappears, who governs the cinematic and serial imagination. From that date, this game will also be played directly within the European market.

Netflix got this far because it understood before anyone else that the audience no longer wanted to wait. It turned viewing into a habit, habit into addiction, and addiction into a global industrial model. For years, it operated in a position of substantial competitive isolation, accumulating users, data, and symbolic capital. Then the system reacted: Amazon strengthened Prime Video, Disney withdrew its catalogs to build Disney+, other groups replicated the model, and the market quickly became saturated. From that moment on, Netflix stopped growing by inertia and began to defend its position, squeezing margins, raising prices, limiting account sharing, and selecting projects more strictly. It became less visionary and more structural. Today, not only it seeks titles, but stability and control.

Warner Bros. Discovery, on the other hand, is coming out of a long period of attrition. A fusion created to resist the decline of traditional television has produced a heavyweight giant, heavily indebted and forced into continuous reorganization. Cuts, cancellations of films already in production, removal of content from platforms, drastic cost reductions. Not because there is a lack of brands, but because those brands alone are no longer enough to sustain a system built for an era that no longer exists. Separating assets, making certain parts of the group “marketable,” and preparing the ground for extraordinary operations was a defensive choice, dictated by debt rather than an expansionary strategy.
In this context, Netflix's interest does not appear to be a whim, but a consistent move. Warner does not only mean studios and catalogs: It means HBO, DC, decades of classic and contemporary cinema, a continuity of production that Netflix, on its own, struggles to guarantee. For the Californian platform, it would be the definitive transition from dominant streaming player to global entertainment super-major: No longer just a platform that hosts content, but a center of gravity that owns, produces, and distributes it without intermediaries. This is precisely what alarms regulators and observers: less competition, less pluralism, more uniformity.

Not surprisingly, the idea of absorbing HBO Max and Warner content has already sparked a bipartisan reaction in the United States. Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that the deal would concentrate “nearly half of the streaming market” in the hands of a single entity, with the risk of higher prices, less choice for consumers, and reduced creative autonomy. Republican leaders have also called for immediate intervention by antitrust authorities, arguing that such a deal would mark the end of the golden age of streaming.
In this scenario, the direct entry in the Italian scene of HBO is another piece of the puzzle. A long-awaited, postponed, and negotiated event that is now taking shape. HBO is not a platform like any other: It is a brand that has built the very concept of ‘quality’ series, a benchmark that has educated the public to a specific idea of storytelling, writing, and production. Its entry into the Italian market raises the bar, but also narrows the field. Because in a small and already crowded market, each new giant does not really expand choice: It concentrates it.

The risk for Italy is not having too many platforms, but becoming increasingly a territory of consumption and less and less of independent production. Local content survives only if it is compatible with global logic, stories are shaped to be exportable, and cinema becomes a reservoir of intellectual property or a testing ground for serial formats. In this context, the possible acquisition of Warner by Netflix and the arrival of HBO are two sides of the same coin: The end of the illusion that streaming is an open and democratic space.
And at this point, it must be said clearly, without pretense or superficial neutrality: Physically going to the cinema in theaters remains something else. Not out of nostalgia or romanticism, but because it is the only place that resists fragmentation, algorithms, and permanent distraction. Streaming is a channel, useful, powerful, and often inevitable. But it is also a system that flattens, consumes, and forgets. The Cinema, the real thing, was created to be watched together, in the dark, without breaks and without automatic suggestions. Everything else is the entertainment industry. And often, much more simply, it is just noise.

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