Much has been made of Netflix’s proposed purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) by critics on both the left and the right, including here at Chronicles. But for all the objections, few seem to merit much alarm about the immediate future of the entertainment industry.

On the right most worry that Netflix—which has been notorious for producing cringe and woke content, particularly in its children’s programming—might impose its brand of toxic leftism on WBD. This assumes, however, not only that all of Netflix’s content is woke but that WBD’s content is somehow not already infected. In truth, Netflix, WBD, and pretty much all large studios are feature a hefty portion of wokeness in their catalogues.

As with any other business, film producers respond to certain incentives—not just financial, but also cultural and political. If a movie or show can make money, win artistic or social acclaim, or do messaging on behalf of a certain interest, it will be produced. If it fails to promise any of these things, it will not be produced. For the past decade, woke entertainment was a response to these incentives, but the incentives have changed, causing wokeness to begin to recede from popular media.

Therefore, Netflix’s acquisition of WBD is unlikely to change anything one way or the other in this regard. If anything, the leaders of Netflix may tell the directors and writers at WBD to tone it down. Outside the Hollywood bubble, there is simply little appetite for Batman coming out as transgender, or a black lesbian girlboss replacing Keanu Reeves’s Neo from the Matrix, or making Voldemort the misunderstood hero in the Harry Potter franchise.

Leftists seem to fear the influence of Netflix on WBD, however, because of its potential effect on the latter’s prestige content included in the deal. Any tampering or cutting seems unlikely since these movies and series have committed fans. And as even the leftist critic Melanie McFarland acknowledges, Netflix CEO Ted Sarano has no interest in fixing what isn’t broken: “His [Sarano’s] admiration for HBO is well-established, and it would be an unwise business strategy to kill or diminish prestige TV’s standard bearer after acquiring it.”

A bigger concern for those on the left is their inherent discomfort with any large merger. In their understanding, most mergers lead to a job losses, diminished competition, and the possibility of a monopoly that could lead to higher prices for consumers. On cue, self-identified trust buster and Native American Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared that “This deal looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare” and that “under Donald Trump, the antitrust review process has also become a cesspool of political favoritism and corruption.” 

Yet, despite these worries about monopolies in entertainment, the event never seems to materialize in real life. In this case, there are still other streaming platforms like Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and a host of smaller ones. If Netflix jacks up their prices, audiences can simply subscribe to a different service. They can also opt out of streaming completely or simply check out DVDs from the library, like I’ve started doing.

Better yet, they may just take up another pastime altogether—like reading.

Unfortunately, that seems unlikely. If streaming becomes too expensive, the current migration from feature-length films and television series to the mindless scrolling of short video platforms like TikTok will accelerate. Already, new television shows and movies are being dumbed down to serve as secondary background content to which people can run while tied to their smartphones.

Of course, if this transition is already happening without a Netflix monopoly in place, then it may not matter who owns what or what price is charged for subscriptions. And this may be real issue. Underneath all the commentary is the sad realization that the film industry is slowly dying.

As popular YouTuber Critical Drinker explains in his video on the topic, the old model is dissolving. No one wants to pay exorbitant sums of money to sit in a nasty old movie theatre with a bunch of annoying people and watch a movie that will be streaming in a matter of weeks anyway.

True, this does not necessarily mean the end of all cinemas but going to the movie theatre to see a new movie is already becoming a niche activity, like attending a play or a music concert. One might even go further, as Ted Goia does, and predict that filmmaking as an art form will become niche. In the future, movies and television series will no longer be mainstream entertainment, but something more  like what cable television is today: a form of media targeted at the older generations while younger generations scroll through their feeds of algorithmically determined shorts.

I am more optimistic. I think the competition that could arise from these addictive platforms will encourage filmmakers to do more. Instead of pointlessly competing with digital slop by creating bigger, dumber spectacles and more artless propaganda, they can recover what was always done best in feature length movies and shows: telling a good story with universal themes and compelling characters. This is what many people want, and what can still be done if filmmakers and production studios have the incentive to do it.

As for any large media mergers, as longtime movie critic Richard Brody recently documented, mergers have been happening since time immemorial. While such deals can and have had an incidental impact on the industry over the years, public demand for good stories has remained: “The art of movies doesn’t advance in lockstep with Hollywood’s commercial success, and crises in the business don’t necessarily harm the art—but there are matters that transcend the art of movies.”

At most, Netflix’s buyout of WBD may disrupt certain financial arrangements and threaten job security of the less valuable people in the industry. For the most part, however, it is a completely understandable move that should enable Netflix and WBD to do what each company does best. If it doesn’t and the companies go bankrupt, then it won’t be because they made this deal, but because they forgot what made them successful and culturally relevant in the first place.