The $100bn battle for the soul of Hollywood

The bidding war for Warner Bros will determine the future of film - will London escape the fallout?

- Jonathan Prynn

Hollywood was mourning one of its finest this week. Tinseltown reeled in shock after Rob Reiner, the director of When Harry Met Sally, This Is Spinal Tap and A Few Good Men, was killed with his wife Michele. Their son, Nick, has been charged with their murders.

The ghastly loss has, for a few days at least, distracted attention away from the gargantuan takeover battle for Warner Bros that, in a very different way, has brought a sense of grief for the passing of the old order in La La Land.

The epic saga started at the start of this month when the king of the streamers, Netflix - maker of Stranger Things and Squid Game - announced it had secured agreement for an $82.7 billion (£62 billion) takeover of Warner Bros Discovery. The media company is the owner of the legendary studio that brought classics such as Casablanca and Citizen Kane to the big screen, along with modern favourites including the Harry Potter franchise.

Heavily indebted, it made a $148 million (£120 million) loss in the third quarter of this year and stunned the industry in October when it announced it was considering a sale, after "multiple parties" made unsolicited offers.

The proposed Netflix deal appalled many true believers in the magic of cinema. They had not forgotten the chilling, and for some heretical, words of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos in 2023, when he tweeted "there's no reason to believe that the movie itself is better on any size of screen," pointing out that his editor son Tony "watched Lawrence of Arabia on his phone". The sense of unease in the film industry, still recovering from Covid and the Hollywood strikes and battling the AI threat, is palpable.