Like most of the studio moguls during Hollywood’s golden years, Warner Bros. chief Jack Warner is remembered, if at all, for his studio’s product. Despite his multiple shortcomings as a boss, he was the guy who shaped the studio that pioneered talking pictures, the studio where Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and James Cagney left indelible marks on American (and global) culture, where the classic gangster film flourished, where Busby Berkeley and Harry Warren advanced the art of the film musical, and where Casablanca emerged as the gold standard of studio production.
Current Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav will be remembered, if at all, as the guy who sold Warner Bros. to the Ellison family in return for a golden parachute worth $887 million.
During the decades between Warner and Zaslav, Hollywood’s products slowly took a back seat to Hollywood’s deals, but the gap between the moguls and between their legacies is so vast that it reflects something even greater: the eclipse of enterprise capitalism by shareholder capitalism.
The battle for Warner Bros. between Netflix and Paramount Skydance (the company owned by the Ellisons) was understandably the subject of much coverage last year, but the question of why Warner Bros. was for sale at all didn’t come up all that often. Warner Bros., in fact, was having a year of stellar success. At a time when movie theatergoing was said to be a thing of the past, and when most other studios persisted in turning out a stream of sequels within their superhero franchises, Warner Bros. became the first studio to make more than $4 billion in a single year, turning out a wide range of films in a wide number of genres. Its films included the two most acclaimed movies of the year: One Battle After Another and Sinners. The studio’s films won 11 Oscars last month, tying the all-time record.
Zaslav was merely following the logic of the financialized capitalism of the past half-century.
Had he still been running the studio last year, Jack Warner would have thought the idea of putting the studio on the auction block to be psychotically insane. Why break up such a winning combination for a quick, if massive, payoff? Moreover, what would he do in the absence of his studio, which was even more tightly linked to his identity than it was to Bogart’s, or Cagney’s, or Casablanca and Robin Hood director Michael Curtiz’s?
Clearly, that question never even crossed David Zaslav’s mind. No one—least of all Zaslav himself—identified him with Sinners or One Battle After Another or even the string of Warner Bros. hits. He was identified, rather, with Warner Bros. Discovery’s share value and profit margins; he was there to sell the company once it reached a valuation that would compel possible buyers to make hefty offers to shareholders and provide a humongous golden parachute to him.
Zaslav’s calculations didn’t factor in the career and financial futures of Warner Bros. employees, or the larger Hollywood and filmmaking communities, or the filmgoing public. Once the company was subsumed under Ellison’s Paramount, the consolidation would clearly lead to layoffs and fewer films. Coming at a time when the Los Angeles–based industry was continuing to hemorrhage jobs (one recent study reports that the Hollywood workforce shrank by 42,000 jobs between 2022 and 2024), the sale has provoked an unsurprising backlash from the people who actually make movies.
One week ago, more than 3,000 actors, writers, and directors—including Bryan Cranston, Ben Stiller, Kristen Stewart, Joaquin Phoenix, Tiffany Haddish, JJ Abrams, Jane Fonda, and the deal’s most vocal opponent, Mark Ruffalo—released a letter opposing the deal, predicting it would lead to “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”
“We have witnessed a steep decline in the number of films produced and released, alongside a narrowing of the kinds of stories that are financed and distributed,” the letter continued. “Increasingly, a small number of powerful entities determine what gets made—and on what terms—leaving creators and independent businesses with fewer viable paths to sustain their work.”
The letter’s signatories know whereof they speak. Purchases like Paramount’s of Warner Bros. saddle the purchased company with huge levels of debt (in this case, a cool $79 billion) that invariably lead to major reductions in production and mass layoffs, as was the case when Disney purchased 21st Century Fox in 2019. And it is notable that they have spoken out, after months during the Netflix and Paramount bidding war when the creative community was silent. There is now an open revolt in Hollywood toward a deal that would greatly diminish the number of bidders for their work, and almost certainly reduce the number of films being made.
It’s clear that the Ellisons don’t expect to encounter antitrust objections to the deal from Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission. The Ellisons, both father and Oracle founder Larry (one of the world’s wealthiest billionaires) and son and Paramount Skydance CEO David, have done everything humanly possible to win Trump’s favor. In addition to Larry’s sizable contributions to Trump’s 2024 campaign, David’s purchase of Paramount, which included CBS, enabled him to have the network respond to a Trump lawsuit alleging insufficient deference to Trump by paying Trump $16 million. Just to ensure that Trump’s Justice Department does nothing to obstruct his purchase of Warner Bros., David has invited Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth to be his guests at the CBS table at this week’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and is hosting a reception two days earlier in honor of Trump. (Not even Rupert Murdoch would contemplate such an absurd violation of basic journalistic ethics.) The most significant benefit Trump will get out of Paramount’s unobstructed purchase of Warner Bros., of course, is that included in the package is CNN, a perennial target of Trump’s ire, which Ellison has indicated he’ll make more Trump-friendly, just as he brought in Bari Weiss to Trumpify CBS News.
In his complete disregard for Warner Bros. employees and Hollywood generally, Zaslav was merely following the logic of the financialized capitalism of the past half-century, in which the care and feeding of major shareholders has become the only metric by which business leaders are judged. (That metric became much beloved by business leaders during the 1980s and ’90s, when they managed to get their corporate boards to agree to reward them with stock options, and helped persuade Ronald Reagan’s FTC to permit them to authorize their companies’ buybacks of their stock, thereby both enabling them to create paydays for themselves and also increasing the value of the stocks they still held, with which they’d eventually be paid.)
Masses of workers in companies bought by the competition or by private equity are characteristically laid off, but have generally been denied the right even to participate as witnesses in the hearings held to determine if these purchases violate antitrust statutes. The sole exception to this came during the Biden presidency, when his FTC commissioners permitted employees at Albertsons to testify against the company’s proposed purchase by Kroger. No such participation is likely under Trump’s antitrust oversight of the Paramount-Warner Brothers deal, where Trump’s ability to shut down CNN clearly eclipses such other concerns as legality. But as my colleague David Dayen has noted, state attorneys general have been filing antitrust actions of their own, just last week winning a crucial suit against Live Nation. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, one of the plaintiffs in that suit, has made clear that he’ll scrutinize the Paramount–Warner Bros. deal, doubtless with attention to antitrust criteria that may be singularly absent at Trump’s Justice Department.
I can’t imagine that any of the film workers’ efforts to stop the merger will give Trump and his minions any pause, but I do have one stray idea. The film worker with the longest working relationship with Warner Bros., dating back to the late 1960s and encompassing more than 40 films in which he either starred or directed or both, is Clint Eastwood. Eastwood is nobody’s idea of a liberal, but he does strike me as a guy who probably values workers at least as much as, and probably more than, investors in and out for a quick buck. I have no idea what kind of shape he’s currently in—he’s 95 years old—but if ever Hollywood needed a classic Western hero to ride to its rescue, Eastwood might be the guy, and the time is definitely now.
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