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Netflix’s Conquest of Hollywood is Complete
• Jan 30, 2026

Netflix’s Conquest of Hollywood is Complete

It was hardly a surprise to anyone when, in December, Bloomberg broke the news that Warner Bros. president and CEO David Zaslav had agreed to sell the historic studio. Ever since Zaslav took over the company in 2021, the former cable television lawyer showed seemingly no interest in running the place as a profitable business. Zaslav buried films like Clint Eastwood’s excellent Juror #2, sending it to fewer than 50 theaters for just two weeks, despite sold-out screenings and critical acclaim. He canceled releases of already finished projects, like the documentary series Peltz Beckhams vs. the Wedding Planners, about Nicola Peltz Beckham’s lawsuit against her wedding planners, as a favor to Zaslav’s racist billionaire friend Nelson Peltz, Nicola’s father. Even as the studio floundered, Zaslav pillaged Warners for hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, while issuing countless rounds of layoffs. By 2024, he was publicly begging the next presidential administration to allow for more deregulation and mergers.What was shocking about the Warner Bros. sale was that the company that won the bid was Netflix. Just weeks earlier, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters had played down his company’s interest in Warner Bros., stating at a media conference that Netflix preferred building businesses to buying them. “One should have a reasonable amount of skepticism around big media mergers,” he said. “They don’t have an amazing track record over time.”For months, Paramount, and its new owner, David Ellison, had been widely projected to be the front-runner in the Warner Bros. auction. Zaslav had only put his company up for sale after Ellison, in his mad quest to own all media, made an unsolicited bid for the studio in September. Ellison had the money and political capital to complete the deal. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and David’s father, had put $12 billion of his own fortune into his son’s $108 billion bid. He was also a friend of Donald Trump and uniquely positioned to help Paramount avoid scrutiny from the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission. (In 2020, Larry went so far as to join a call with Sean Hannity and Lindsey Graham about overturning the election in Trump’s favor.)But as it soon emerged, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s other CEO, had been forging his own ties with the president. In November, Sarandos visited Trump at the White House to discuss a Netflix–Warner Bros. merger. He reportedly left convinced that Trump wouldn’t stand in his way. Combined with the strength of Netflix’s financing, this meeting of minds was apparently enough to assure Zaslav and the Warner Bros. board that Netflix’s smaller $72 billion bid, which excludes Warners legacy television networks like TNT and CNN, was more likely to succeed.Now on the precipice of success, Sarandos is threatening to create one of the most damaging media conglomerates in the history of motion picture entertainment. The result will be more layoffs in Hollywood, fewer and lower-quality movies in theaters around the world, and at higher prices. The deal, which is motivated first and foremost by greed—Zaslav stands to earn $567 million from the sale, potentially making him a billionaire—should not just be blocked. Both companies should be broken up for parts, their streaming platforms spun off. The fact that the merger has even been agreed upon proves that a much deeper, more sinister takeover has already been completed: The studios are willingly charting a different future for entertainment.For years, Sarandos has claimed that traditional Hollywood studios like Warner Bros. were dinosaurs whose business models were “completely out of step with the consumer.” So why merge with one?Netflix wants Warner Bros. for two reasons. Foremost is that the merger will help Netflix improve its reputation. Despite growing from a small DVD-by-mail startup into the most powerful Hollywood studio to ever exist, Netflix has never been fully embraced by top talent, rank-and-file guild members, critics, or anyone in Hollywood who doesn’t already work for Netflix. When the company inaugurated its streaming platform in 2007, Hollywood executives viewed the streamer as a company of useful idiots who were getting their pockets picked for free: Netflix would license films and shows from legacy studios, then pay the studios handsomely, as it embraced a growth strategy built around cheap subscriptions and eye-popping spending.Even when Netflix found success in 2013 with the television show House of Cards, the company’s first original hit series, executives touted themselves to the media as the innovators of “binge watching,” a new way to consume unhealthy amounts of television that derived its name from an eating disorder. In an industry where reputation and relationships with talent can supersede the most sober financial decision-making, Netflix’s reputation as a band of tasteless interlopers seeking the destruction of Hollywood’s way of life always posed an awkward problem for the company.Giant bags of money helped smooth things over. Netflix got a foothold in television by giving large checks to producers and talent, who were paid up front and guaranteed a profit in lieu of back-end residuals. Around 2016, when Netflix moved into distributing and producing original movies, the company acquired independent films from top festivals, and eventually funded established auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion, and Noah Baumbach, giving them limited theatrical releases. But by the end of the decade, just as Netflix had achieved market dominance, the streamer pulled back on spending. The large, up-front checks disappeared. Independents at festivals found that Netflix no longer wanted to buy their films. Instead of auteurs, Netflix focused on pumping out as much cheap content as possible with little evident regard for quality.A decade and change into its pivot into original content, Netflix has become the de facto home for half-baked, glorified TV movies, which get dumped on the company’s platform and are never seen nor heard from again. Aside from a few gems (Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Todd Haynes’s May December, and Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague), the company’s film library is mostly forgettable, oversaturated, poorly directed, high-def digital mush, with stupid titles that insult great cinematic achievements. (See: a romance about an American rehabbing his Italian villa, called La Dolce Villa.)The Warner Bros. archive, on the other hand, which had absorbed MGM and RKO’s pre-1986 fabled libraries in previous mergers, includes Meet Me in St. Louis, The Big Sleep, Citizen Kane, and thousands of other masterpieces and classics. Ted Sarandos once defended Netflix’s low-quality films by claiming his company, a newcomer, was at a disadvantage by having to “make up for not having 90 years of storytelling.” By acquiring Warner Bros.’ more than 100 years of storytelling, Netflix believes it won’t have to make up for anything ever again.The other reason Netflix wants Warners is that it will help kneecap movie theaters, one of the streamer’s key competitors. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Sarandos tried to assuage fears over his company’s hostility to theaters by promising to maintain Warner Bros.’ 45-day theatrical window—the period where films play exclusively in theaters before they’re available to stream or purchase at home.But for at least a decade Sarandos has been advocating for shorter theatrical windows, which would devastate exhibitors. He’s routinely told journalists that theatrical exhibition, and windowing specifically, are “outmoded,” too expensive, and no longer worth the hassle. “If you’re fortunate enough to live in Manhattan, and you can walk to a multiplex and see a movie, that’s fantastic,” he said in April. “Most of the country cannot.”Claims like this, which Sarandos loves to make, are misleading. Recent data shows that theatrical exhibition is not only a viable business, but is growing in popularity with young people. Sarandos is of course not wrong to identify that some kinds of theatergoing have become expensive, soul-sucking torture chambers: The theatrical industry is dominated by oversize multiplexes that program bad movies, charge too much money, and are in inconvenient malls and suburban lots that can only be reached by car.But what Sarandos fails to say is that legacy Hollywood studios like Warner Bros. are largely responsible for creating this paradigm. Ever since the release of Jaws in 1975, studios and theater owners have oriented moviegoing around blockbusters that premiere on thousands of screens around the world. The largest theater chains soon built out their multiscreen theaters into souped-up multiplexes with dozens of screens, which benefited from economies of scale.Netflix has taken advantage of multiplex misery by attempting to wind down theatrical exhibition altogether. But it’s clear this isn’t what audiences want. Newer distributors like A24, Neon, and Mubi have responded to multiplex immiseration with great success by pushing good movies for the independent and art house circuits. Warner Bros., for its part, has managed to find continued success with theatrical releases, both blockbuster franchises (the DC universe) and auteur-led one-offs (Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar front-runner One Battle After Another). Netflix’s attempt to buy the company that accounts for 20 percent of North American box-office receipts bodes poorly for exhibitors. Acquiring these bargaining chips will give Netflix enormous leverage over theater owners as it aims to cut down theatrical windows and make theater-going unrecognizable.Netflix is the largest streamer in the world. HBO Max, the streaming platform owned by Warner Bros., is the fourth-largest. Combining these businesses, according to the antitrust scholar Tim Wu, likely violates Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which prohibits mergers that substantially decrease competition. According to Justice Department and FTC guidelines, any merger or acquisition that pushes a company’s market share past 30 percent in a given market is presumptively illegal. “At the 101 law student level, look at the guidelines and look at this merger,” Wu told me. “It looks a lot like driving 65 in a 50 zone.”Should the Trump administration attempt to block the merger, the outcome of any litigation will likely depend on how Netflix’s market is defined by the courts. Despite producing thousands of original movies and shows and wielding more studio power than Jack Warner could have ever dreamed of, Netflix continues to insist that it’s not a Hollywood studio at all. Instead, the company likes to argue, Netflix is more like YouTube, whose number of monthly visitors is 10 times the size of Netflix’s entire subscriber base. Netflix executives have been obfuscating like this for years, playing a shell game with the press about who it’s really competing with. (Sometimes these arguments accidentally swing back around into bracing honesty. In 2017, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings claimed that the streamer’s chief rival was the biological need for sleep.)Netflix wants audiences to believe that there is no difference between watching a movie and watching one of the three million videos uploaded to YouTube daily. To Netflix, it’s all “content,” which can be consumed from any device, in any location, and at any point in the day. In a sense, Netflix is right: One of the streamer’s greatest achievements was to cheapen Hollywood by flooding it with films and shows that are as artful, entertaining, and disposable as the zero-budget garbage served up by the YouTube algorithm, and pushing every other Hollywood studio to do the same. Still, there are crucial and obvious differences between the two companies. YouTube lets anyone upload to its website. It doesn’t produce, distribute, and exhibit original films and television shows with stars that compete for awards. Just because audiences might pay attention to YouTube at the expense of Netflix doesn’t change the fact that the two companies are in fundamentally different industries, rely on different economies, and employ different people.“It’s a weak argument,” Wu said of Netflix’s YouTube defense. For him, the company’s position is analogous to the idea of McDonald’s buying Burger King and then claiming that its main competitor is every restaurant in the world, not other fast-food chains. “Netflix and its defenders have been effectively making an argument like, ‘oh, everything is a restaurant. Anything you’re spending your attention on is our competition,’” Wu said. “It looks like a loser to me.”As is the case with so many tech platforms, Netflix has simply re-created twentieth-century technology for the digital age, and made it worse.In truth, Netflix is a global television company. As America’s go-to provider for low-level, mass entertainment, the streamer is no different from any of the major broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox), except that Netflix is more powerful, unconstrained by geography and the physical limits of coaxial cable lines, and totally unregulated. By law, the networks have always had to broadcast their over-the-air signal to Americans for free, the cost of which was paid for by advertising. Despite now showing ads, Netflix has no free signal or stream. The company has raised its standard price by 100 percent over the last 14 years and will likely raise it significantly if the merger is completed. As is the case with so many tech platforms, Netflix has simply re-created twentieth-century technology for the digital age and made it worse.While Netflix’s ultimate goal is to smash the film and television industries into one and take control of the wreckage, Netflix’s executives, as always, are playing the long game. Sarandos understands that theaters aren’t going away in the near or even medium-term future. Instead, they are devolving, especially in rural and suburban regions that face more closures and decreased projection quality. Acquiring Warner Bros. will give Netflix the tools to shore up its beleaguered film unit, collect major profits as the industry contracts, and launder its reputation through a historic studio that comes without Netflix’s reputational baggage. If the merger is completed, It would not be surprising if Netflix moved its auteur films inside Warner Bros. to give it a better shot at winning an Academy Award for best picture, Hollywood’s ultimate symbol of legitimacy, which academy voters have thus far never been able to bring themselves to confer on Netflix.By selling itself to Netflix, Warner Bros. has confirmed a truth about Hollywood that had long been apparent but is now unignorable: The studios have no competing vision for the future of entertainment. To them, the cinema is just a headache they’d rather be rid of. Netflix might have once been viewed as a threat to their business models, but the merger shows just how much the streamer has succeeded, having not only conquered Hollywood’s balance sheets, but now the imaginations of studio executives. For Zaslav, the relief has never been more comforting.

Jane Birkin and the Art of Authenticity
• Jan 30, 2026

Jane Birkin and the Art of Authenticity

In 2022, Charlotte Gainsbourg brought her mother, Jane Birkin, to her deceased father’s apartment in Paris’s 7th arrondissement and recorded the visit in her documentary, Jane by Charlotte. She was preparing to transform the residence into a museum—which is now open to the public, a walk-through memorial to the legendary pop singer Serge Gainsbourg. The scene does not serve as particularly glowing publicity. As mother and daughter reminisce over where the piano used to be and their memories of the first nine years of Charlotte’s life, one is struck by the darkness of the space, how it lacks light and air. Gainsbourg surrounded himself with expensive art objects, liquor bottles, and nudes of his female collaborators, including an enormous picture of Brigitte Bardot’s and Birkin’s headless busts. As Marisa Meltzer aptly notes in It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, the place is “like a version of Bluebeard’s castle,” full of trophies commemorating his prowess. It doesn’t need to be transformed into a museum. Everything is already dead and under glass.I try to imagine the two women there as they would have been in 1971, a 24-year-old mother with her newborn, trying to comfort or feed or carry her daughter while tiptoeing around Gainsbourg’s drinking. Nine years later, shortly before she left him, Birkin would confess in her journals, which she maintained throughout her life, that she wanted a house full of sunlight and a garden for her girls to play in—the opposite of the material conditions dictated by her partner. Birkin, of course, contributed to Gainsbourg’s music too. She was his most famous collaborator, her breathy, girlish voice contrasting with his raspy innuendo. In the 1970s, they were a cultural lodestar, heralding artistic and sexual freedom, which Gainsbourg proclaimed in his lyrics and Birkin showed with her barely there miniskirts and transparent tops. Yet the glamor covered up the fact that Birkin was constantly on the back foot in the relationship, as would become known with their increasingly volatile fights in public. Gainsbourg told her what to wear, wrote and produced the songs, and pitted her against fellow starlets in order to get her to sing for him. He profited from her youth (there was an 18-year age gap), her looks, her hipness, her love of rock and roll (he had been educated on the piano), while pocketing the money and receiving all the credit. When Birkin passed on July 16, 2023, so closely was her name associated with the role of muse—she is also known for inspiring her Hermès namesake bag, and had children with two other influential male artists, composer John Barry and director Jacques Doillon—that a flurry of articles surfaced lamenting the title, calling it unfair and out of touch. Yet in these interventions, Birkin is rarely if ever cited on what she thought about her work and life. There is a vague call to move past the alluring images of her in her twenties, the ones constantly recycled on Instagram capturing her trademark style: high-waisted jeans; white T-shirts; Mary Janes; the famous, pre-Hermès basket bag containing her signature clutter. I still didn’t see much engagement with the movies she wrote and directed, even if they weren’t blockbusters, or her collaborations with French female director Agnès Varda, or her quips revealing painful self-awareness. It is easy to say a muse was voiceless, powerless, and left no trace; it means you don’t have to try to look for her.As the muse of muses, Birkin was still being used to make a point, even in this reconsideration of the gendered power dynamics of art-making. It is easy to say she was voiceless, powerless, and left no trace; it means you don’t have to do your homework and try to look for her and what she wrote and thought about the subject.In It Girl, Meltzer went ahead and did this. Birkin is typically described as a creative eccentric, given opportunities via powerful men. The most repeated actions on her Wikipedia page are she met, she appeared in, she performed in, she had a role. She sang like she talked, and acted naturally in front of the camera, as if playing herself. “What exactly Birkin is doing so well comes across so effortlessly, it’s like she’s not performing at all,” Meltzer writes about her appearance in the 1972 cult hit The Swimming Pool, pointing out that it would be all too easy to attribute her fame to the preternatural beauty of her youth, her gap tooth, awkward physicality, and distanced reverie giving her the air of a fawn or a colt, long legs awry. Her performances, taken separately, as they often are, seem to be the haphazard result of good timing and talented collaborators. But in Meltzer’s telling, a portrait emerges of an artist with a vision, a distinctive way of seeing the world. Birkin’s genius was in her life and in her actions just as much as in her look. It’s the reason why her cool translates across time; why we continue to exclaim over the way she wore her T-shirts and always looked a little messy, a little undone. Her daughter Lou Doillon described it as “total freedom, and a freedom that does not care about the judgments of others.” The fact that Doillon was talking about her mother’s decisions with her family rather than her wardrobe goes to show that Birkin insisted on such liberty on many fronts. I thus disagree with Meltzer’s pronouncement that “we can dress like her,” or even the idea that Birkin makes Frenchness accessible to the outsider, given her transplant status from Britain and her penchant for ready-to-wear. Copy her clothes as you will, you cannot replicate her style. She does not inspire an exact following of her outfits, but rather the identification of the structures that let you live, just as she found them for herself.“It” is a notoriously difficult quality to pinpoint, especially in an age of niche internet celebrities and nepo babies who lack “it,” who fail to launch into the collective imaginary with an aura transcending the commonplace. I like Joseph Roach’s definition in the book by the same name, “the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities.” Birkin was so good at walking these paradoxical lines of innocence and experience, glamor and humility, courage and vulnerability, feminine and masculine. Every time someone tried to typecast her talent, she went out of her way to contradict them—as when Gainsbourg suggested she wear her hair in curls in 1987 for her first concert and she responded by asking to borrow his nail scissors so she could give herself a choppy bob. Birkin could have become the darling of auteur film in France, or played into boomer nostalgia with her Gainsbourg retrospective concerts, or shot campaigns for the innumerable companies who would have loved to use her as their face. This would have allowed her to turn herself into a brand, her image into a product with a predictable fanbase. But she did not, guided instead by a loyalty seemingly pledged to herself over any kind of capital. Some might call this naïve; others principled—the very reason why she is so loved. Meltzer points out that Birkin, despite her eccentricities, was still “an ectomorph born from a family of thinness and wealth,” upholding the status quo. Her mother was an actress, her father a Royal Navy lieutenant commander. Winston Churchill’s daughter was Birkin’s godmother. Birkin’s own daughters, meanwhile, continue to promote a glamorous image of the Parisienne much like their mother’s. She was refreshingly unique, in a way that’s difficult to approximate today. She did not formulate her image to maximize clicks and likes and engagement. Yet, however much of Birkin’s success depended on a cocktail of privilege and childhood wounds, she was refreshingly unique, in a way that’s difficult to approximate today. She did not formulate her image to maximize clicks and likes and engagement. She never shaped her persona to game an algorithm. Yes, we see her through the eyes of the men who photographed and wrote for her, and this dynamic was unquestionably exploited behind the scenes. Yet when she looks at us, her gaze still feels relational, intimate, as if she is seeing, responding, engaging with someone, rather than an abstraction of what an audience might want. While the death of the muse and reciprocal rise of the influencer have made certain gains for feminism, there are nevertheless losses in this trade, ones less easily determined than the question of who holds the camera.Meltzer appropriately captures Birkin’s breezy style, her self-avowed ignorance when it came to the stunts she pulled off as Gainsbourg’s accomplice, bemused by the exclamations over her taste for courting controversy. Of their infamous collaboration “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” in which she unequivocally implies sex through her moaning, Birkin said, “I don’t know what all the fuss was about.… I’m still not sure they know what it means.” When talking about a photo shoot for the men’s magazine Lui, in which she was cuffed to a bed at Gainsbourg’s request, she laughed. “I was very moral,” she said, in response to the backlash. “I didn’t ask for payment or to intervene in the choice of photos that were published. I don’t find naked girls indecent, nor do the gentlemen.”Of course the lack of self-awareness was necessary for the ploy, for the audience to read her as the ingenuous “woman-child,” as Meltzer puts it. Birkin was rewarded for showcasing her bodily freedom—which demanded genuine daring at the time, in revolt against Dior petticoats and bullet bras—yet could only do so by downplaying her own savvy and experience. Meltzer relates the time when director Jacques Deray (of The Swimming Pool) threw a tantrum when Birkin brought her daughter to the set, whereas, tellingly, the toddlers of her male co-stars were given free rein. She responded by locking herself in the bathroom with her child, refusing to come out until Deray apologized.Yet, despite her grit, it’s also evident that there is a thread of hurt running through her life, especially when it comes to her romantic partners. While Birkin remained almost completely silent on the subject of physical abuse in her journals, Gainsbourg openly admitted to it: “When she gave me an earful, I didn’t like it: two seconds too much and bam! … she took it on the chin with me.” She became addicted to sleeping pills when her first husband started giving them to her because he didn’t want to listen to her talk. In this light, her jokes and self-directed put-downs seem less endearing and more like a learned trauma response, after being told by the people she loved that she was better off staying quiet. Doillon was not much better. Birkin’s namesake Hermès bag came about when a company executive spotted her signature straw purse in pieces; Doillon had run it over with his car, yelling at her that she shouldn’t be known for her “object.” The Birkin legend reads almost like a Greek myth, in which the seed of her greatness is planted through repeated acts of violence. Meltzer’s biography  leaves room for others to try to tease out Birkin’s internal monologue, one full of contradictions that both break her muse status and let us relate to her struggle.  Meltzer is skilled at both conjuring the heady ambiance of 1970s Paris and telling it straight, holding up Birkin’s highs and lows. She resists over-speculation, except perhaps when concluding a chapter. Too many end with affirmations: “She wanted to work,” “she was moving on,” “she was in on the joke all along,” she was “ready to focus back on her own self.” Some days Birkin lived up to such pronouncements, a modern-day Joan of Arc—her dream role, and one she self-avowedly never played because of her imperfect French. Like the saint, Birkin did what she did despite the disbelief of everyone around her, on the basis of a vision she alone could see, while the rest of culture breathlessly tried to keep up. This is how she became an icon; it is what is captured in the photos that continue to circulate; it is what we keep admiring and trying to imitate. Yet sometimes she failed to live up to her promise. She was afraid of speaking up, afraid of rejection, afraid of being alone. While Meltzer’s biography gives us so much, she leaves room for others to try to tease out Birkin’s internal monologue, one full of contradictions that both break her muse status and let us relate to her struggle.   At the time of her breakup with Doillon, Birkin finally realized her wish for an idyllic family home, buying a modest house in Britanny on France’s northwest coast. As seen in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s documentary, it is full of sunlight with an enormous garden in the back. A year before she passed, while struggling with cancer at the age of 75, Birkin shows her granddaughter how to plant morning glory seeds, still full of the same rapturous optimism of her early years. Her house feels both alive and lived in, full of food and dogs, collected mementos, bursting at its seams. This is the kind of museum I want to go to, as opposed to Gainsbourg’s lair. Then again, I don’t know how her home could be turned into a memorial dedicated to her person, since she wouldn’t be there. Hers was the art that can’t be staged or bought with a ticket, the kind that disappeared when she did.

Trump-GOP Panic Over ICE Grows as MAGA Goes Off Rails: “Race Traitor!”
• Jan 30, 2026

Trump-GOP Panic Over ICE Grows as MAGA Goes Off Rails: “Race Traitor!”

President Trump and the GOP are in a growing panic over ICE. Trump’s advisers are sinking into recriminations. Republican officials are publicly admitting that his immigration agenda “seems to be not working” and that the GOP is “losing” the political battle over it. Others are suggesting that Alex Pretti’s killing was “murder” and that it’s time to “recalibrate.” Yet MAGA figures are pulling in the other direction. Media Matters has a good roundup: Many are urging Trump to escalate, with white supremacist Nick Fuentes labeling Pretti a “race traitor.” MAGA doesn’t want to let the GOP even appear to moderate. We talked to Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, who has a new piece urging Democrats not to let up. We discuss how MAGA’s white nationalist brutality has landed “moderate” Republicans in a trap, why this provides an opening to divide the Trump coalition, and what Democrats can do to demonstrate that they side with the American people against Trump-MAGA’s violent lawlessness. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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