Netflix and Warner Bros. Deal
Media Consolidation and the Disappearing Illusion of Choice
When Netflix announced it was buying Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion, the internet kind of shrugged. A few “RIP HBO” memes circulated, some people cheered the idea of “one app to rule them all,” and the rest of us just tried to figure out whether our subscriptions were about to get more expensive.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how streaming already feels weirdly repetitive, like every new show is secretly the same show in a wig. And maybe the sameness isn’t an accident. Maybe it’s by design.
This is exactly the kind of thing Theodor Adorno was yelling about decades ago. He warned that when big media companies consolidate, culture gets “standardized.” Basically: once art becomes a mass product, companies stop taking risks. Everything starts to look alike because originality is expensive and formulas are safe.
And honestly… doesn’t that describe streaming right now?
We already joke about “the Netflix look”, desaturated colors, identical title cards, prestige dramas that feel engineered in a lab. When one giant company is in charge of greenlighting most of what we watch, the creative range naturally shrinks. Now imagine that same company owning the massive Warner Bros. catalog and the HBO legacy. That’s not just influence; that’s the gravitational pull of a planet.
What worries me isn’t that Netflix will make bad content. They won’t. They’ll make plenty of good stuff. What worries me is that the weird stuff (my kind of stuff), the experiments, the cultural oddballs, the passionate projects that don’t fit a neat category, will get squeezed out. There are fewer places for creators to pitch their ideas now. Fewer buyers means fewer chances to be different.
From a consumer perspective, consolidation feels like more choice. One app! Thousands of titles! What a deal! But once you step back, the “more” starts to look like “more of the same.” It’s like walking into a giant grocery store and realizing 90% of the brands are actually owned by two corporations...
That illusion of variety is exactly what Adorno was talking about.
So yeah, I’ll probably still watch whatever new HBO show drops on Netflix. Or maybe I'll finally figure out how to pirate successfully. But I can’t shake feeling uneasy. When one company owns this much of our cultural diet, it gets harder for anything unexpected, or genuinely new, to break through.
And honestly? I miss being surprised.
References
Netflix, Inc. (2025, December 5). Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. following the separation of Discovery Global for a total enterprise value of $82.7 billion (equity value of $72.0 billion). PR Newswire. https://ir.netflix.net/investor-news-and-events/financial-releases/press-release-details/2025/NETFLIX-TO-ACQUIRE-WARNER-BROS-…
Andrae, T. (n.d.). Adorno on mass culture. Jump Cut. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/AdornoMassCult.html
Image from Variety