Did Netflix just exacerbate a bunch of seasonal affective disorders in cinephiles? Timed to ruin holidays like a round of end-of-year layoffs, the streaming giant announced plans to buy Warner Bros, a movie and television studio with a full-century legacy. It’s possible that the acquisition won’t actually go through – and if it does, it won’t be for at least a year. But the news still looms over year-end awards and list-making, and it’s going to take more than a jingle-bell heist to steal back any holiday cheer for the entertainment industry, much less halt the march of corporate consolidation and monopolization. Even more depressing: the entity that seems most able to take action against this is … another attempted consolidation. Paramount has launched a bid for a hostile takeover of Warner Bros Discovery, which would bring two big studios under one extremely Trump-friendly umbrella. This would almost certainly further cull the number of wide-release movies released each year.

Depression might not seem like a rational response, especially for anyone who doesn’t actually work in said industry. (There are plenty of reasons that various unions are making their opposition to either sale known.) Yet the news last week had hundreds of film fans posting eulogies and defenses not just of Warner Bros as a studio – which on its own includes a vast history encompassing classics like Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Departed, Bonnie and Clyde, The Searchers and The Matrix, among hundreds – but the very fabric of theatrical moviegoing.

It’s an institution that many of us took for granted for years. The venues might change, with single-screen palaces and drive-ins giving way to mall theaters and multiplexes, but it was easy to assume that movie theaters would always be around in some form or another. Now some habitual moviegoers, still shaken up by the extended closure of many theaters during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic and a Netflix-led cultural shift toward watching everything on the couch, periodically enter a panic over whether theaters as we know them will still exist in 10 or 20 years.

They probably will – at least in big cities, where a variety of mainstream new releases, arthouse runs and rep screenings sustain a healthy variety of exhibition options. (Manhattan alone has more than two-dozen theaters.) But beyond the many areas where a thriving movie house is not a given, it increasingly feels like the ability of movie theaters and studios to weather various storms may not actually matter in the face of such corporate flexes.

What’s dispiriting about the Netflix news is how clearly it indicates how little a studio’s actual success matters in terms of sustaining itself – because on those terms, Warner Bros had a spectacular year in 2025. They captured the youth audience with A Minecraft Movie, posted huge grosses for original and auteur-driven genre hybrids Sinners and Weapons, revitalized their superhero franchise with Superman, maintained two storied horror series with new Final Destination and Conjuring sequels, positioned One Battle After Another for a possible Oscar run (and gave Paul Thomas Anderson his most-seen movie yet), and even had a hand in an old-fashioned, near-literal star vehicle by distributing Apple’s F1 movie with Brad Pitt. And while previous years saw some costly flops, they’re only a few years out from Barbie becoming their biggest movie ever. Not to get corny about something that is, after all, another mega-corporation of its own, but between Barbie, Dune, Minecraft, Superman, One Battle After Another and various movies where King Kong fights Godzilla, chances are most casual moviegoers had at least one great time a Warner Bros movie sometime in the last couple of years.

In the hands of the Warner Bros Discovery CEO, David Zaslav, though, these hits aren’t evidence of how the movie business can flourish. They’re valued insofar as they can help goose the possibility of a sale. On the other side of that transaction, Netflix probably isn’t buying Warner Bros because they see a valuable library of older films and a ready-made pipeline to major theatrical releases. In a movie-centric utopia, Netflix could complement the Warner Bros slate with lower-budget romcoms, adult-driven thrillers and teen movies that big studios often ignore, as well as a regular supply of the streamer’s sideline in artistic passion projects from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Noah Baumbach and David Fincher. (Maybe auteurs like Scorsese and Lee wouldn’t be scared off after a single movie, knowing that Warner Bros could actually put their films in theaters.) Netflix could also bring all manner of classic cinema into viewers’ homes.

But judging by how many pre-1990 titles on Netflix at any given time and the awards-qualifying theatrical releases it begrudgingly gives its more prestigious projects, a rich catalog and major theatrical releases are elements of the film industry and its history that the company vaguely disdains. Netflix is buying Warner Bros mostly to eliminate the competition of HBO Max – and maybe, down the road, the broader competition of people occasionally leaving their homes for entertainment.

Oh, and the IP. Netflix subscribers received a so-sad-it’s-funny email from the company about the impending purchase, in which they crowed about “bringing some of the world’s most beloved franchises like Harry Potter, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Casablanca, Game of Thrones and the DC Universe together with Stranger Things, Wednesday, Squid Game, Bridgerton and KPop Demon Hunters.” It’s telling that the token Warner movie that they algorithmed into this announcement is Casablanca, perhaps the most “name a movie” movie of all time (at least in the pre-1970 division), which they immediately, bafflingly, and terrifyingly describe as a “franchise”. (For that matter, how is Friends a franchise? That show has yielded one reunion special and a bunch of cheesy in-person pop-ups in the 20 years since it left the air.)

On its own, this is just corporate insensitivity and bumbling – neither particularly endemic to 2025 in particular. And yes, the movie-lover’s grandstanding over the sanctity of the theatrical experience can feel a little embarrassing. Suddenly we’re all Nicole Kidman, reading from a series of quasi-PSAs on behalf of multiplexes that forget to turn the lights down and don’t employ projectionists who can fix technical issues. Divorced from that grandiosity, though, moviegoing can be a simple pleasure, a relatively affordable escape that some companies seem hellbent on treating like a productivity problem, begging to be solved. Wouldn’t you save energy by staying home? Wouldn’t you feel like you’re saving money if you agree to give us 20 bucks a month in perpetuity for whatever stuff we can scrounge up for our homepage? Doesn’t the decision to watch a particular movie take up valuable brainpower we could colonize with an algorithm? Even if Paramount doesn’t succeed in wresting Warner away from Netflix, a hostile takeover has already begun. Tech weirdos want control of our art and leisure. We shouldn’t cede it to them.