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If Warner Bros. Discovery was only a movie house, it would have had one of its best years ever. Two of its films (One Battle After Another and Sinners) are front-runners for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it had a string of critical hits and box-office successes with Superman, Weapons, and A Minecraft Movie. But the company is a media conglomerate that counts HBO and CNN among the brands it owns, and it took on lots of debt; its box-office success in 2025 is not enough to make up for its financial struggles.
This year, the company found itself up for auction. After over a hundred years as a major Hollywood studio, Warner Bros. fate seemed unclear. Now months into a process that Netflix formally won, Paramount still hopes to come out on top with a hostile bid. This week even, the billionaire Larry Ellison, whose son, David, controls Paramount, offered a personal guarantee for the deal.
The bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery is a business story that morphed into a future-of-entertainment story and then recently took an ominous turn into politics. President Donald Trump weighed in, saying he would be “involved” in deciding who wins, which put every party on alert that Trump might be particularly watching what happens to CNN, a cable network he has called “the least trusted name in news” and a “political arm of the Democrat Party.”
Trump has sued ABC News, CBS News, the BBC, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. His administration has federally defunded PBS and NPR, and put pressure on networks to cancel late-night shows. In the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war, Trump has hinted that he leans toward Paramount, and this week brought new claims of political interference of the news at the Ellison-run Paramount. 60 Minutes pulled a segment on the harsh conditions at a prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans earlier this year. Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, said the story needed more work even though it had apparently been fact-checked and legally vetted, not to mention promoted on air.
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to the Atlantic film critic David Sims about what the outcome of this deal might mean for movie lovers, especially those who hope to keep going to movies in theaters. And we talk to our staff writer Frank Foer about Trump’s increasing influence on the media landscape and his subtle campaign to disappear CNN.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I know we’re months from the Oscars, but will you name your top-three picks for Best Picture?
David Sims: In terms of who I think may well win?
Rosin: Mm.
Sims: Or who I want to win?
Rosin: Mm.
Sims: (Laughs.)
Rosin: I think I’m gonna go with want. I think I’m gonna go with want. That’s—
Sims: I’ve got the same pick for both, honestly, is I do think One Battle After Another will win out; I would say Sinners and Hamnet are the other sort of big players right now.
Rosin: I was hoping you would say One Battle After Another and Sinners, only so I could have a smooth transition into the conversation I want to have with you.
Sims: Absolutely.
[Music]
Rosin: One Battle After Another and Sinners, two front-runners for the Oscar for Best Picture, both came out of the same studio this year: Warner Bros.
Sims: Those are movies from very established filmmakers with big stars in them.
Leonardo DiCaprio (as Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another): My name is Bob Ferguson. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of me, all right? I was part of French 75.
Sims: But they were for grown-ups. These are R-rated movies.
Michael B. Jordan (as Elijah “Smoke” Moore in Sinners): Y’all Klan?
Jack O’Connell (as Remmick in Sinners): Sir. We believe in equality and music.
Sims: They were going up against more established franchise stuff, and they dominated the conversation.
Rosin: This is Atlantic movie critic David Sims.
Sims: They did well in every kind of space.
Rosin: It was also the same studio that made Weapons, Superman, and A Minecraft Movie— critical hits, along with box-office successes—movies for families and movies for families who like Paul Thomas Anderson.
Sims: They had the kind of year studio executives dream of.
Rosin: So what better way to end a banner year at Warner Bros. Pictures than by selling it?
This fall, Warner Bros. Discovery—which includes all of its movie studios, HBO, DC Comics, and a bunch of other things—announced that it was on the market.
An initial front-runner was Paramount.
Sims: So Paramount was there—it was an existing movie studio, recently bought by David Ellison after he spent years trying to take it over. He’s the son of Larry Ellison. He’s a very, very rich tech billionaire.
Rosin: But their bid was rejected. So Paramount kept submitting more bids, and those were all rejected too.
Meanwhile (Netflix sound effect plays.) Netflix was also interested and swooped in.
Wolf Blitzer (from CNN): New this morning, Netflix has inked a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery to buy the iconic TV and movie studio and its streaming assets, including HBO. We should mention—
[Music]
Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. The bidding war for Warner Bros. is a business story that’s morphing into an entertainment story and then took an ominous turn into politics.
President Donald Trump: So we’ll have to see what happens.
Rosin: Recently, President Donald Trump weighed in on the matter, suggesting that he was personally interested in the outcome—which adds a whole new layer of complication.
Trump: And I’ll be involved in that decision too. But they have a very big market share.
Rosin: Paramount and Netflix have been back and forth these last few weeks, each trying creative moves to outdo the other. On Monday, for example, Larry Ellison offered a personal guarantee for the Paramount deal, which means that one of the richest men in America is on the hook if it fails. That’s the business part.
For those of us who care more about the movies? The truth is that both options might make them a little worse—for different reasons.
And for those of us who care most about democracy? It would not be the first time that the president has inserted himself into the business of media. We’ll talk to staff writer Frank Foer about that later.
But first, critic David Sims on what he pays the most attention to: What does this Warner Bros. Discovery deal mean for the movies when the number of big movie studios just keeps shrinking?
Sims: Obviously, this is a looming nightmare that Hollywood has been worried about for longer than the last few months. And for the last few years, Warner Bros., which is one part of a big conglomeration of TV networks and other stuff has been a company that’s sort of laden with debt and has had some bad corporate owners in the past, that’s been passed around, so a lot of people have been waiting to see who will swoop in to sort of salvage the company or transform it. And the fear’s always been, It’ll get sucked up too. The Hollywood studios will continue to sort of condense into a bigger and bigger blob, which, really, it means nothing good for art, unfortunately.
Rosin: Okay, well, slow that down ’cause you said “fear”—you’re separating, already, in your answer quality from financial stability. So it was a studio that made good movies but was financially not stable, I guess, for a while, so why “fear”—why don’t we see this as rescuing Warner Bros.?
Sims: Well, Warner Bros., the movie studio itself, there’s not a huge profit issue there. That’s the sort of jewel of the company, along with HBO, which is part of this corporate consideration.
It’s the other stuff that’s been the problem, and David Zaslav, who’s been running the company for a few years at this point, since it merged with Discovery, has been trying to cut fat. He’s laid people off. He’s canceled whole movies outright. He’s been running it pretty lean, and I think everyone in the industry has been watching and sort of noting that he’s clearly preparing to get acquired.
Now, in the old days, Warner Bros. used to be owned by AT&T. Before then, it was owned by AOL. Back in the day, Coca-Cola used to own one of the movie studios. Big companies would own movie studios ’cause it was fun to own a movie studio—you would get to be a player in Hollywood, and you would have glitz and glamour. But now, it feels like the only companies that want these movie studios are other movie studios.
Rosin: So let me ask you: If, for years and years, big companies have owned movie studios, why is this moment such a big deal? Why do people like you talk about it with trepidation in their voices—nd “people like you,” I mean people who love movies and movie theaters and just the whole tradition of Hollywood? Why is this any different than Coca-Cola or anybody else?
Sims: Well, so it feels like there’s two outcomes to this Warner Bros. deal, it seems, and both of them are causing agita for different reasons.
[Music]
Sims: If Paramount, which is another big studio, had bought Warner Bros., you have what happened to Disney and Fox, probably, happening again, so Fox still exists in some form, as a sort of subsidiary of Disney—t releases a few movies a year—but you’ve kind of dried up one of the wells of big movie production in Hollywood. If that happens with Paramount owning Warner Bros., once again, you feel the pool of big movies shrinking in Hollywood. You feel this sort of competition shrinking.
Now, Netflix is this kind of different beast because they operate a different model. They’ve made money a different way. Obviously, they’re all in on streaming. So far, they’ve sort of communicated publicly, like, Oh, no, no, no. Warner Bros. is a different business than ours, and we wouldn’t wanna kill its theatrical industry. But because Netflix has been so uniquely aggressive about sort of getting their movies onto TV rather than in theaters, there’s this just huge anxiety amongst people like me and people who make movies that the movie-theater industry just cannot survive losing that many movies a year, if that’s where this is going.
Rosin: Why are theatrical—this is not obvious to me. It seems to me—what I care about is that good movies get made. Why is theatergoing the lifeblood of good movies? Does it change the incentive structure of what kind of movies you make and how good or creative or original they are?
Sims: Possibly. Look, Netflix has made good movies, but there is a sort of style to a lot of Netflix movies—the more sort of generic stuff that they put out: the rom-coms and the sort of medium-size dramas, whatever—that feels like the movie’s a little more designed to be ignored.
Rosin: Mm.
Sims: Now—
Rosin: Ah, now I understand it. (Laughs.) That feels like a real concern—if you’re creating movies that you know people are going to be checking their phone while watching.
Sims: I think when you talk to the sort of older guard in Hollywood, who are especially worried about the mortality of theaters, there’s also just this feeling of, like, When it’s gone, it won’t come back.
[Music]
Sims: And all of those companies are—they’ve been battered by COVID, they were hurt by the strikes, which really reduced the amount of output lately, and they’re kind of hanging on by a thread right now.
Big movies will come out and do well and kind of demonstrate that audiences are fine going to the theater for something they’re interested in. But it’s tougher for a sort of mid-sized or smaller movie to break out in the ways that they used to—which is why, again, one reason that something like Sinners or One Battle, those films catching on with people is heartening to see because it kind of defies the prediction that companies like Netflix are making of, Ah, well, that old model, that’s sort of dinosaur stuff, and people prefer to just have an a la carte selection at home of whatever they can watch.
Rosin: So we’ve been discussing the Netflix outcome. Tell me what happened with Paramount and what’s the Paramount outcome. How do you see that differently than what you’ve just described?
Sims: I think one reason the Netflix bid seems to have won is that Netflix was cool with Warner Bros., the company, sort of splitting up and its cable channels—these sort of less profitable units—getting spun off and turned into a division that can be dealt with elsewhere or sold off or who knows. And Netflix would take control of kind of the big properties: Warner Bros., HBO, things like that.
Paramount seems to want the whole kit and caboodle; they want everything. They’re willing to pay a lot for it. And it’s a little harder to understand why, outside of, I guess, just this notion of, We need to be as big as possible to compete.
Paramount on its own used to be a very venerable—it’s still venerable, but now they don’t have a Marvel, and they don’t have the kind of streaming service that Netflix or HBO is. So if they can just kind of grow by acquisition, grow by expanding into new areas of storytelling—they can make more comic-book movies, whatever—that’s their argument for: This is the best way to survive.
That might be true for Paramount. It might lead to a lot of layoffs and a lot of consolidation as well. There’s literally just less movies in theaters than there used to be. And so consolidation, you imagine more of that.
Rosin: Right. So whatever the details, you see this as a lose-lose for Hollywood.
Sims: Oh God, I hate to be so pessimistic. I’m usually not the pessimist, I will say. But it’s tough for me to see either of these being smooth. Both of these will be strange corporate maneuvers.
It currently seems like the Netflix thing will happen. But, obviously, Paramount’s exploring this idea of a hostile bid. Combining Netflix and HBO, you’ve got two of the biggest streaming services—that’s a whole mess that maybe regulators won’t object to. There’s the Trump factor of terms of he maybe prefers a bidder—maybe he doesn’t, though? A lot of the reporting seems to suggest maybe he wasn’t as swayed by the Ellisons as the Ellisons thought he would be. Who knows?
All of this is very difficult to foresee. And I think Warner Bros. did not really see this coming. The old rumor was that they wanted Universal, who’s another studio, to get them, and those two powers would combine into something very, very powerful. This is weird in a new way, and it’s kind of like the story of Hollywood of, every year, there’s sort of a new evolution of weird that everyone in the industry just has to wrestle with.
Rosin: David, thank you so much for joining us today.
Sims: Happy to. Anytime.
[Music]
Rosin: After the break, Frank Foer on what happens if Trump does intervene on this deal.
And remember: Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t just in the movie business. They also own CNN.
[Break]
Rosin: The movies are just one part of this Warner Bros. Discovery deal. As we’ll hear from staff writer Frank Foer, politics is another.
According to a recent report from Bloomberg, President Donald Trump privately told people that he wanted this deal to be a competition, to have one side bid against the other for his approval of the deal.
Frank Foer: Because, ultimately, in order to get a merger of this size through, it needs to be blessed by the U.S. government. And it seems like the biggest condition that he’s laid out there is CNN.
Rosin: CNN. Okay, so you think that’s his main interest. What does he want from CNN?
Foer: So Warner Bros. owns CNN, and I think that he hates CNN, that he says it’s run by corrupt, terrible people, and he wants to see them out. Does that mean that he wants to see CNN kind of left on the side of the road to wither and die? Does it mean that he wants the new buyer to come in and renovate CNN in the same sort of way that the Ellisons have come in to CBS News and installed Bari Weiss and to turn that into a different type of news-gathering organization? It’s unclear. I don’t think Trump knows. I think he’s waiting for the bidders to come and present him with the best prize.
Rosin: Okay. I think I need to understand how unusual this level of intervention is. What is the president’s usual official role in a big merger like this?
Foer: So the whole United States government is set up to avoid this type of direct political meddling.
[Music]
Foer: We have agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, which were set up almost a hundred years ago, or more than a hundred years ago in the case of the FTC. And they were supposed to be independent agencies, where you had a set of commissioners—you would have three from the party in charge, two from the out party—where they would make decisions in a relatively bipartisan, technocratic way, in the best interest of the government, so that you didn’t have presidents coming in and picking winners and losers.
But I think it’s pretty clear that, in the end, he’s got a little bit of a rooting interest for Paramount, but he doesn’t wanna make it seem as if he’s putting his thumb on the scale, because that would be bad—that would send bad signals to the world, bad signals to the market. And so, even if he may gesture in the direction of Paramount, I think even Donald Trump knows that he needs to make it look like an open and fair competition.
Rosin: Got it. So he’s, basically, somewhat aware of the kinds of criticisms that a person like Frank Foer at The Atlantic might make, is, This is inappropriate.
Foer: Right. This is a transaction, and so Warner Bros. has shareholders who have to approve a merger themselves and sign up for a deal; they initially signed up to give their company to Netflix. And really, there is a bidding war going on, and part of the bidding war is that—what Paramount says that it brings to the table is that it can get the approval of the president of the United States; it can make it a much more painless transaction than the Netflix purchase.
Rosin: It’s like they’ve already acceded to a world in which the president’s approval or disapproval actually makes a difference in how you do business. It’s like we live in that world now.
Foer: Yeah, yeah. And Netflix understands that too; that’s why Ted Sarandos went and visited—the CEO of Netflix went and visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office himself. This is the world that we live in.
Rosin: So let’s play out the scenario under Trump. What moves has he already made to exert influence over media?
Foer: Right. So we could look at what’s happened to The Washington Post.
[Music]
Foer: During the first Trump term, Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post—or he bought it before Trump—but he recreated the paper, essentially, as a resistance paper: Democracy dies in darkness.
Jeff Bezos: It is a mistake for any elected official, in my opinion, to attack media and journalists. I believe that— (Audience claps.)
Foer: And Trump sees this happening, and he sees the Super Bowl ad they make.
Tom Hanks (in a Washington Post commercial): Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free. (Music swells.)
Foer: And he starts to tweet about how Jeff Bezos is a corrupt guy and that he’s gonna take revenge against Amazon, which he says is doing all sorts of unfair things.
TV anchor (from CNBC): President Trump going after Amazon again, this time in a series of tweets. He writes: “So many stories about me in the @washingtonpost are Fake News. They are as bad as ratings challenged @CNN.”
Lobbyists for Amazon—
Foer: So Bezos sees this happening and he, I think, either consciously or subconsciously, decides that he’s gonna walk away from this resistance persona, and he’s gonna recreate the editorial board of The Washington Post, which he more directly controls, as being something that’s more politically sympathetic to Donald Trump.
TV anchor (from CNN): —after the publisher announced that the newspaper will not endorse a candidate for president. That’s the first time they have not done so in 36 years of presidential elections. The Post itself—
Foer: Or to take another example, we saw the way in which Brendan Carr, the [chairman] of the FCC, said stations that were carrying Jimmy Kimmel—that because of everything that Jimmy Kimmel had said about Charlie Kirk, that they were gonna pay a price.
Brendan Carr (on The Benny Show): —changes that we’ve seen, but, frankly, when you see stuff like this—look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
Foer: And it turned out that a lot of these companies were in the process of undergoing mergers and consolidations—they had a lot of deals sitting in front of the Trump administration—and so they heard his message, and they said, Okay, we’re pulling Jimmy Kimmel from the air.
Rosin: Right, although they did say the decision to pull Kimmel wasn’t actually influenced by FCC communication. But, okay, so let’s overlay those dynamics onto the Warner Bros. sale. What does it look like? Play out what it could look like.
Foer: So we’ve talked about CNN, which, I think, is kind of the most vulnerable asset there. I think that—
Rosin: Wait, so what happens to CNN? Just—this is hypothetical.
Foer: Right. So, hypothetically, they could either say that, We’re gonna buy CNN as part of this deal, and we’re just gonna kill CNN.
Rosin: Paramount could, if Paramount—
Foer: Paramount could do that.
Rosin: —or Netflix.
Foer: Or Netflix. Netflix doesn’t do news, and so they could just say, You know what? If it’s a cost of doing this transaction that you’re forcing us to buy CBS—anything is possible in this sort of world where these types of sums of money are on the table, and there’s an enormous amount of flexibility.
The other scenario—and we’re seeing this with CBS News, which is kind of what I’d call the Orbánification scenario, where Viktor Orbán is the head of state in Hungary, and what he’s done is, essentially, ensured that the biggest media properties in that country are sold to his allies and cronies, who, in turn, neuter those networks or turn them into propaganda apparatus. And so there’s some possibility that that happens. But if Paramount decided to go through with that, it would be painful for Paramount.
Rosin: But why? We just had a perfect model for that, which is: Bari Weiss takes over CBS; Erika Kirk is the first interview. Plenty of people got fired, but it happened.
Foer: It happens; it’s not unthinkable. But CNN is different than CBS. CBS News is something that aims to be straight down the middle. CNN, I think, aims to be straight down the middle, but is, in fact, kind of an anti-Trump network.
Rosin: I see, so it would be more obvious and much more of a fight.
Foer: Yeah. You would lose more viewership that way. You’d lose hosts who, I think, have built personas around criticizing Trump. It would be messy.
Rosin: Right. Okay, so that’s instability for us who work in this industry. But do the shifts in journalism matter for anyone else?
Foer: Right, so if you take The Washington Post.
[Music]
Foer: The Washington Post editorial page had limited reach. But in terms of kind of national voices, there were three national newspapers, three editorial boards. You have The Wall Street Journal, which is already kind of right-wing, and then you take another one and you make it right wing, you’ve changed a substantial portion of the opinion space in national newspaper land.
There are only three meaningful cable networks. One of them is already pro-Trump. You take another one off the table—you’re changing a substantial percentage of cable news.
A democracy is basically only as good as the information that its citizenry gets, and so we are undergoing this long-term crisis where the quality of information that citizens get has been diminished—it’s more likely to be manipulated by algorithms or by outside actors—and that, if we ever have any chance of having a democratic revival in this country, we need there to be quality sources of information.
Rosin: Sometimes I think back to the first days that Jimmy Kimmel was fired and what a shock that was to the country because that was the first time that such an overt pressure happened from the administration, which had such an obvious consequence for a well-known media figure. But then he was reinstated. So is there any hope in that?
Foer: Yeah, I think that there is hope in that, because there was a public backlash. I think that it was a moment where they pushed too hard, and they went too far, and I think a lot of people who may have otherwise cowered or turned away felt compelled to push back.
But, on the other hand, I just look at things relative to where they were in the first Trump term and the whole tenor of conversation. And in the first Trump term, I think a lot of media looked at outrageous things, and they responded with outrage. And here, this is not just because of all these larger economic tides that we’re talking about, but there is a greater numbness that, I think, prevails. It’s less red-blooded. It’s less full-throated. It’s more numb.
Rosin: Thank you, Frank, for joining us today.
Foer: My pleasure.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited and engineered by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak provided original music. Sam Fentress fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
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