Warner-Bros Discovery is one of the five big Hollywood Studios, has a wealth of classic films, and is the #3 streamer. It's already as big as any such thing needs to be. All the previous mergers and acquisitions which produced the present entity led to a decline in production and production quality. And yet, the Board savors more. Why?
It's already been at the point where it can collect ever greater monopoly rents. The board is hoping to merge it to become an even bigger monopolist, which raises the present value of the current monopolies (if nothing else).
IOW, what they're selling is monopoly itself.
This should, of course, be illegal.
And then there's Netflix and Paramount, which ought to be forbidden from buying rival giant companies in the hopes of even greater monopoly than they already have. Netflix is already the top streamer, who would be buying the #3, and then they'd own all the content other streamers rent from Warner-Bros Discovery. Paramount would put half of Hollywood under one right-wing family.
For a long time, anti-trust enforcement relied on the bad doctrine that where greater size yielded greater efficiencies, it should be allowed. We've seen that disproven time and again when resulting companies lose the qualities which originally made them special (like Boeing, who made the most reliable planes). But restoring proper antitrust enforcement (in which the existing companies like Warner Bros Discover would already seem to be monopolies whose very size limited public choices--an inefficient outcome for consumers) would only be a small part of the de-financialization which needs to occur in the US economy.
Finance needs to be boring, and only then can everything else become exciting again.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/netflix-is-trying-to-buy-warner-bros
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