{"id":303821,"date":"2026-02-22T03:27:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T03:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/303821\/"},"modified":"2026-02-22T03:27:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T03:27:07","slug":"mark-ruffalo-inserts-himself-into-james-camerons-netflix-fight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/303821\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Ruffalo inserts himself into James Cameron’s Netflix fight"},"content":{"rendered":"

The thing that distinguishes a big messy public merger fight being waged by entertainment companies from the regular kind of merger fight between, like, electronics stores, is that very few people working for electronics stores are internationally famous. As such, it gets extremely easy for some very well-known people to start wading into the waters surrounding, say, Netflix and Paramount\u2019s current pissing match about who\u2019ll get to eat Warner Bros., and start throwing their weight around. Director James Cameron demonstrated that truth in a fairly pat fashion earlier this week<\/a>, when a letter he wrote to the Senate stridently opposing Netflix\u2019s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery began making the rounds. Now actor Mark Ruffalo has also\u00a0weighed in, attacking Cameron for his involvement. It\u2019s like Oscar winner\/nominee dominoes out here.<\/p>\n

Ruffalo\u2014who, to be fair, is basically never shy about voicing his opinions on anything\u2014took to Threads this weekend<\/a> to put his own spin on Cameron\u2019s letter, asking (per Variety<\/a>) if the Titanic director\u2019s concerns about the antitrust issues raised by Netflix buying Warner Bros. Discovery aren\u2019t just as striking if Paramount is the one that ends up schlorping the whole thing up. \u201cI think the answer would be very interesting for the film community to hear and one that should be asked immediately,\u201d Ruffalo added. \u201cIs Mike Lee [a Utah Republican who chairs the Senate\u2019s antitrust subcommittee] against the Paramount sale as well? Is he as concerned about that as he is the Netflix sale?\u201d<\/p>\n

Reading between the lines, it certainly sounds like Ruffalo is nodding toward some element of political favoritism at work here; Paramount is, after all, now owned by the Ellison family, who are about as friendly with Donald Trump as the billionaire set gets. (Republican critics of Netflix\u2019s acquisition, meanwhile, have cited the company\u2019s \u201cwoke\u201d nature as a reason not to like it<\/a>, while Paramount has already fast-tracked regulatory approvals for its own purchase of the rival studio<\/a>.) For his part, Cameron has been a vocal critic of Trump<\/a>\u2014but he does have a movie with Paramount (his Billie Eilish concert film<\/a> Hit Me Hard And Soft) coming out with the studio in the near future. (His letter didn\u2019t mention Paramount at all, despite Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos accusing it of being part of the \u201cParamount disinformation campaign\u201d<\/a>; Cameron just seems to really, really dislike the idea of a streamer owning a major movie studio.) None of this, obviously, is going to get less messy as the Netflix sale continues shuffling forward, giving even more very famous people more time to weigh in; it feels like tribal lines are being drawn, as various camps decide which corporate kaiju they\u2019re going to root for as they face off to see which one can shove Warner Bros.\u2019 corpse down its maw first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The thing that distinguishes a big messy public merger fight being waged by entertainment companies from the regular…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-303821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}