The best drama series in Hollywood

Ever since it got into streaming in 2007, Netflix has broken every rule in the media industry playbook.

- VANITA KOHLI-KHANDEKAR

It has dropped entire seasons of original shows in one go, kept advertising out of its originals like Squid Game, Stranger Things or Bridgerton yet priced itself at less than a third of cable TV in the United States. With 302 million subscribers and $39 billion in revenues in 2024, it is the largest standalone streaming player in the world. There are, however, limits to pay-driven growth. Now, as it seeks to scale up, Netflix is becoming more like the legacy media players it took on. It introduced ad-supported programming and has got into sports. Its co-Chief Executive Officer, President and Director Ted Sarandos even has a leading role in the merger drama unfolding in Hollywood currently.

Paramount Skydance, the $29 billion (2024 revenues) studio behind Titanic, Forrest Gump, and the Mission Impossible films, among others, had made three unsuccessful bids for rival Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) by October 2025. The last one was at $58 billion. Soon Netflix got into the game. On Friday, December 5, it announced a deal to acquire WBD at a price of $83 billion. Just two days later, on December 8, Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid with an offer of $108 billion.