The Netflix chief who insists he won’t ruin Hollywood

Sarandos has met with President Trump as well as others to press his case.

- Joe Flint

Ted Sarandos has minted his status as an entertainment power broker, but he still feels the need to tell the world that he’s not trying to destroy Hollywood.

To mark the deal to acquire much of Warner Bros. Discovery for $72 billion—even as rival suitor Paramount battled for it—Sarandos toured the Warner Bros. studio lot this past week. He promised in a speech in Paris to keep movies in theaters. And in a memo to Netflix employees after the deal was announced, he directly addressed the question that keeps dogging him.

“Some feel this is the end of Hollywood. What's our response to that?” he and co-Chief Executive Greg Peters wrote. “We see this as a win for the entertainment industry, not the end of it.”

Sarandos—a student of Hollywood history who worked as a video-store clerk growing up—has long sought an iconic studio property and production lot such as the sprawling Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif, according to people close to him.

It would be the capper for an executive who has at Netflix introduced radical changes that are now norms: binge viewing a season’s worth of episodes at once, streaming movies instead of going to the theater, and paying creators upfront.

“He could care less about sentimental norms and traditional models,” said Mark Shapiro, president of WME Group and TKO Group, parent of Ultimate Fighting Championship and World Wrestling Entertainment. He “is completely comfortable with change and evolution.”

“Half the town wants to do business with him, and the other half wants an invite just to hang,” Shapiro said.

Those invitations are often to Sarandos’s Southern California homes, which include a residence in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and a mansion in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, that he purchased from Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi for $34 million. His neighbors there include Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, as well as Oprah Winfrey.