You can read about this today at Deadline, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter.

Now, the interesting thing is that Netflix originally had little interest in buying Warner Bros, but they really didn’t want Paramount Skydance to get it. And it seems obvious that this is all about the WB catalog and the streaming business.

Right now, Disney owns their own catalog, plus 20th Century Studios/Fox, Searchlight Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Touchstone, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, etc.

Amazon owns the recent MGM catalog, plus some Orion Pictures, United Artists, etc.

Paramount owns their own catalog, plus they have some rights to Miramax titles, and they own Republic Pictures, live action DreamWorks titles, Skydance, Nickelodeon & MTV.

And Warner Bros. owns their own catalog, plus New Line, Castle Rock, Hanna-Barbera, DC Studios, Turner Entertainment, the classic MGM catalog, HBO, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, and classic films from Orion Pictures, American International Pictures, and Lorimar.

Then of course you have Sony, Lionsgate, and Universal, which each have catalog content of their own that’s not insignificant, but isn’t really relevant to this deal.

Now… Netflix works with many of these studios to license streaming content. But if Paramount were to absorb the Warner Bros. catalogs, they would almost instantly become the biggest content player in Hollywood. And they could make it very difficult or impossible, and/or more expensive, for Netflix to license that content.

So the bottom line is, I don’t think Netflix could afford to let that happen.

Now… this isn’t necessarily over yet. I’m sure the Ellisons and Paramount Skydance are going to push back hard, threaten legal action, and of course they have a very close relationship with the current administration in Washington DC, which is ultimately going to have to approve this merger either way. And it’s entirely possible that should the Ellisons express displeasure in the right ears, the administration could simply choose not to approve the Netflix/WB merger. I mean, at this level of power, money, and influence, everything is transactional and you just never know. [Update: Paramount seems to be considering just such a strategy.]

A lot of people have asked us today what this means for physical media. And the truth is, I don’t think we really know yet. There are already lots of people online rushing to claim that this means the end of the disc business—I think that’s premature. Certainly, very little of what’s been happening in Hollywood since about 2016 (the push to streaming, the decline of the replication business, COVID, and repeated studio mergers and acquisitions) has been good for the disc business, but that’s a topic for a future post.

I do however think that Netflix winning Warner Bros. is probably the lesser of two bad outcomes compared to Paramount Skydance buying the studio. And the reason I say that is because I know for a fact that Paramount Home Entertainment has essentially been gutted by the powers that be who prepped the way for Skydance to purchase Paramount, and the situation hasn’t gotten better since the Ellisons took over there. In fact, I see very little evidence that the Ellisons even remotely care about the physical media business. I hope I’m wrong about that, but until things change at Paramount—until we start to see a resurgence of new 4K catalog product coming out of their recent distribution deal with Alliance Entertainment—there’s just very little evidence to the contrary.

What all this means, ultimately, is that we’re going to have to wait and see And you can rest assured that I’m going to have a lot more to say about it all in the weeks to come.

Now then… having touched upon that depressing piece of news, how about a little bit of good news for a change? Yes? Okay, here it is…

Lucasfilm has just confirmed something we’ve suspected for a while now and that we’ve talked about recently on our Patreon page (click here for that), namely that the original 1977 version of George Lucas’ Star Wars is indeed returning to theaters for a limited time in 2027 in honor of the film’s 50th anniversary!

As many of you know, there’s been an ongoing restoration of all three original Star Wars Trilogy films—Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983)—happening over the past year, word of which began leaking several months ago, first to those of us working in the industry (and yes, it is indeed true), and then more widely online.

Well, today Lucasfilm has just officially confirmed what we suspected—that the original version of the film is indeed coming back—and they’ve also confirmed that it’s being newly restored!

Now, there’s no mention of a physical media or streaming release of the original 1977 Star Wars yet, but for a company that is laser-focused on making money, it would be very surprising to me indeed if a disc release wasn’t also planned by Disney in time for the holidays in 2027. The studio would no doubt want to release it on Disney+ as well.

In any case, here’s the link to the original Lucasfilm statement from this morning on StarWars.com (click here for that).

All right, that’s all for today... and goodness knows it’s more than enough news for one day!

We’ll be back on Monday with more news, more new disc reviews, and we’ll have more to say on all of this business then as well. And once again, if you haven’t subscribed to our Digital Bits Patreon page, we’re definitely going to be getting into it all in more detail there—including in regular video blog posts that I’ve been sharing there. And know that subscribing to us on Patreon really helps us to keep The Digital Bits website here going strong into the future and to keep it free for everyone.

So thank you all in advance for considering subscribing!

Have a great weekend, folks, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!

- Bill Hunt

(You can follow Bill on social media on Twitter, BlueSky, and Facebook, and also here on Patreon)