Netflix intends to purchase Warner Bros. for $72 billion. The deal would give the world’s largest streamer ownership of a 102-year-old archive including Hollywood’s most legendary film and television IP—from Casablanca to The Color Purple. The monumental sale arrives at a time of extreme economic headwinds and unprecedented job losses in the entertainment industry.
This isn’t just a historic transaction. It powers a broader global trend toward massive consolidation in media.
But beneath the headlines is a more urgent question: What does the world’s most powerful streamer combined with the most storied studio mean for Black creatives, Black culture, and Black economic power inside Hollywood?
Here’s my forecast.
1. A shrinking seat at the table
Clearing redundancies and restructuring are inevitable in acquisitions at this scale, and shareholders mandate it to reduce costs. Unfortunately, Black senior leaders and Black middle managers often bear the brunt of cuts. Warner Bros. Discovery only has a handful of Black senior leaders, including Channing Dungey, Warner’s Chairman and CEO of their television group, and a longtime entertainment leader who previously ran ABC Entertainment. Under Netflix rule, a company with a vastly different operating structure, does Dungey’s role and influence survive?
And what of Black employees in the middle layers of the company, who are already significantly outnumbered? Consolidation typically leads to fewer Black decision makers in the room, fewer champions for diverse storytelling, and waning influence during a period already defined by anti-DEI backlash.
2. Conglomerates trigger steely gatekeeping
Sinners delivered a culture-shifting win for Warner Bros, defying the decline of theatrical releases, with a global box office nearing $400 million. But the scale of Warner’s $90 million investment on the Coogler–Jordan partnership is an anomaly. For the average Black filmmaker, passing through Hollywood’s steely gatekeepers remains extraordinarily difficult. Even when projects clear that bar, many face early cancellations or one-season fates.
In summer 2021, HBO infamously cancelled Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country after a single acclaimed season and has offered very few Black-led series since. But it’s also important to acknowledge historical context. Consolidation does not automatically mean fewer opportunities for Black film and TV.
In the era when Time Warner operated as one of the world’s most powerful entertainment conglomerates, it housed Warner Bros., Warner Music Group, Time Inc., including People, Entertainment Weekly, Essence, and the book publisher Simon & Schuster.
During that period, Warner fueled the heyday of Black cinema in the 1990s with titles like Set It Off, Friday, and Hoodlum, and powered the rise of Black sitcoms, among them include classics Family Matters and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
But that same conglomerate also produced the nadir of Black cinema and the dearth of the Black sitcom, often justified under the biased theory Black-led stories are “too niche” or lacked broad cultural appeal.
