Netflix intends to buy Warner Bros. for $72 billion. The deal would give the world’s largest streamer possession of a 102-year-old archive together with Hollywood’s most legendary movie and tv IP—from Casablanca to The Colour Purple. The monumental sale arrives at a time of maximum financial headwinds and unprecedented job losses within the leisure trade.

This isn’t only a historic transaction. It powers a broader world development towards huge consolidation in media. 

However beneath the headlines is a extra pressing query: What does the world’s strongest streamer mixed with essentially the most storied studio imply for Black creatives, Black tradition, and Black financial energy inside Hollywood?

Right here’s my forecast.

1. A shrinking seat on the desk

Clearing redundancies and restructuring are inevitable in acquisitions at this scale, and shareholders mandate it to cut back prices. Sadly, Black senior leaders and Black center managers typically bear the brunt of cuts. Warner Bros. Discovery solely has a handful of Black senior leaders, together with Channing Dungey, Warner’s Chairman and CEO of their tv group, and a longtime leisure chief who beforehand ran ABC Leisure. Beneath Netflix rule, an organization with a vastly completely different working construction, does Dungey’s function and affect survive?

And what of Black staff within the center layers of the corporate, who’re already considerably outnumbered? Consolidation usually results in fewer Black determination makers within the room, fewer champions for various storytelling, and waning affect throughout a interval already outlined by anti-DEI backlash.

2. Conglomerates set off steely gatekeeping

Sinners delivered a culture-shifting win for Warner Bros, defying the decline of theatrical releases, with a worldwide field workplace nearing $400 million. However the scale of Warner’s $90 million funding on the Coogler–Jordan partnership is an anomaly. For the typical Black filmmaker, passing by means of Hollywood’s steely gatekeepers stays terribly troublesome. Even when tasks clear that bar, many face early cancellations or one-season fates.

In summer season 2021, HBO infamously cancelled Misha Inexperienced’s Lovecraft Nation after a single acclaimed season and has supplied only a few Black-led collection since. But it surely’s additionally necessary to acknowledge historic context. Consolidation doesn’t routinely imply fewer alternatives for Black movie and TV.

Within the period when Time Warner operated as one of many world’s strongest leisure conglomerates, it housed Warner Bros., Warner Music Group, Time Inc., together with Individuals, Leisure Weekly, Essence, and the guide writer Simon & Schuster.

Throughout that interval, Warner fueled the heyday of Black cinema within the Nineties with titles like Set It Off, Friday, and Hoodlum, and powered the rise of Black sitcoms, amongst them embody classics Household Issues and The Contemporary Prince of Bel-Air.

However that very same conglomerate additionally produced the nadir of Black cinema and the dearth of the Black sitcom, typically justified below the biased concept Black-led tales are “too area of interest” or lacked broad cultural attraction.