The boss of Netflix has launched a fresh defence of its $82.7bn (£61bn) takeover of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) assets, as he defended the streaming company’s contribution to the UK film and TV industry.
Ted Sarandos claimed Netflix buying WBD would bring “growth” to the entertainment industry, amid attempts by rival Paramount Skydance to launch a counter offer for the studio business which he said would do the opposite.
“We’re buying a movie studio and a distribution entity that we don’t currently have,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We’ll be adding to the market where Paramount has committed that they’re going to cut $6bn out of the business right away.”
“This industry would be much smaller under that ownership than it would be under Netflix ownership.”
Sarandos’s comments followed an extraordinary intervention in the corporate battle by Donald Trump over the weekend.
The president ordered Netflix to remove the Democratic foreign policy expert Susan Rice – a former member of Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s administrations – from its board or “face the consequences”.
When asked about the comments, Sarandos said: “This is a business deal, it’s not a political deal … He likes to do a lot of things on social media.”
Paramount has been given until the end of Monday to table its best and final offer for WBD to compete with Netflix’s existing offer.
Paramount, which is controlled by the billionaire Ellison family, has tried to secure a $108.4bn takeover of WBD with a bid backstopped by a personal $40bn guarantee by Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, the cloud computing firm.
Netflix’s bid is for WBD’s studio and streaming platforms, with the rest of the company being spun off separately. Paramount’s bid is for the entire corporation including its TV networks.
Critics have condemned both proposals, saying they would excessively consolidate power with one owner.
Sarandos said if Paramount took over WBD it would be among the “classic, horizontal media mergers that are always bad for consumers, always bad for creators, because basically what they’re just taking is two studios and collapsing them into one”.
Separately, he defended Netflix’s contribution to the entertainment industry in the UK after calls from MPs for a competition review of the proposed deal.
In January, politicians wrote to regulators saying it could lead “to a substantial lessening of competition with damaging consequences for consumers, the UK’s world-leading creative industries and the UK cinema industry”.
Sarandos said: “Our teams here are 100% British. The writers and directors and creators of this programming are all British. This isn’t like an American coming in and trying to do, you know, something with a British accent.
“Right now we have 59 productions happening here in the UK. Only about 17 or so are … non-British projects that are filming here. So I think our level of commitment both to the creative community in the UK is unchallenged.”
He pointed to recent hits such as Baby Reindeer and Adolescence as examples of British stories that “may have fallen through the cracks” otherwise.
Those series “have been able to find a very big audience which gives us the courage to take some big swings and do things that are slightly unconventional,” he said.
