![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n\n\tOn Dec. 4, as Hollywood was metabolizing the news that the studio of\u00a0Citizen Kane, Casablanca\u00a0and\u00a0Harry Potter\u00a0was about to be owned by the platform of Tiger\u00a0King, Dahmer\u00a0and\u00a0Squid Game,\u00a0I reached out to a high-ranking studio executive in town to gauge his thoughts. \u201cDisaster,\u201d he texted, before proceeding to explain how the swallowing of a studio by a streamer would spell bad news, whether it meant no Warner Bros. films to sustain movie theaters or a lot less Netflix outside licensing to sustain movie studios.\u00a0The streamer of\u00a0House of Cards\u00a0could bring down the whole shaky structure.<\/p>\n
\n\tBy Monday, with Paramount\u2019s David Ellison tilting at windmills to try to stop Ted Sarandos\u2019 Netflixian invasion, the studio executive hummed a different tune. He didn\u2019t feel as morose as he did a few days earlier, he said. Not that he thought disaster was any less likely \u2014 even if Ellison won, major consolidation awaited, plus Ellison\u2019s Trump connections. No, the executive had simply resigned himself to the contracting Hollywood this all represented. To this new arena of few big, let alone original, hits; to a place where expensive, corporatized storytelling could hold no candle to the quick-turn, inexpensively made short videos young people watched or the quick-turn, inexpensively made long podcasts older people listened to.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd so rather than choose between two false saviors, he decided just to take out the popcorn and watch them duke it out.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tYou couldn\u2019t avoid the irony: The drama for how traditional Hollywood will be devoured is now as entertaining as anything Hollywood could ever come up with. Movies have conflicts between gritty human characters; late-stage capitalism has the son of a tech centibillionaire and the leader of a $400 billion international giant trading insults at Wall Street-analyst\u00a0conventions.\u00a0(Ellison: \u201cNetflix \u2026 offers inferior and uncertain value<\/a>.\u201d Sarandos, wearily: \u201cEntirely expected<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n \n\tOh, and don\u2019t forget Saudi money and the president\u2019s son-in-law, both financing Ellison\u2019s bid \u2014 or both parties cozying up to a president who fancies himself an M&A gatekeeper.<\/p>\n \n\tThe town\u2019s leadership gap is impossible to miss; the C-suite is fading with no big names to fill it. Comcast\u2019s Brian Roberts (66) and Disney\u2019s Bob Iger (74) both preside over companies whose models, of cable subscriptions and theme-park merchandising, now seem less aggressively capitalistic\u00a0than quaintly from another era \u2014 and how much longer are those guys here for, anyway? (Iger\u2019s announcement Thursday that Disney would be going all in on recycled-AI videos did not, for all its patina of the future, suggest a bold leap forward.) Many of the leaders-in-waiting lack the stature or vision, and those that appear to have it \u2014 Universal\u2019s Donna Langley and Disney\u2019s Dana Walden or Josh D\u2019Amaro come to mind \u2014 have to fight boards, share prices and, most crucially, falling profits that don\u2019t facilitate risk-taking and vision.<\/p>\n \n\tIn comes Sarandos, who has defied the odds at every turn with his upstart streaming company, and Ellison, born on third base with a fierce determination to be a mogul. These are our options. These are the two men vying to be the Last King of Hollywood.\u00a0Two men, separated by 20 years but united by their belief that they are the true standard-bearers of the Dream Machine that Jack Warner and Irving Thalberg and Carolyn Strauss and Bob Evans and Sheri Lansing and Barry Diller built way back in the 20th\u00a0century.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSarandos: \u201cWe want HBO to double down on the things that people have loved for 50 years.\u201d\u00a0Ellison: \u201cWe love the movie and entertainment business; we believe\u00a0deeply in its future and we want to preserve and strengthen it.\u201d Never mind that neither man before this year has ever presided over anything close to a traditional Hollywood entertainment entity. And one of them, Sarandos, has shown flashes of disdain for it.<\/p>\n \n\tIn some ways, the purchase of one of the oldest studios by one of the newest disrupters would be a development long coming. Silicon Valley has been devouring the traditional industry for many years now \u2014 forcing companies to alter their business models, spending\u00a0practices, release patterns and, soon enough in this age of AI, their production methods. And yet something feels jolting. Netflix was a disrupter, a forever-scrapper trying to gain the respect of Warner Bros. It wasn\u2019t supposed to be\u00a0owning\u00a0Warner Bros. It\u2019s hard to fathom now, but talk for years was\u00a0of how a major studio might buy Netflix, not the other way around.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tDavid Ellison seems an even less likely leader: An up-and-down movie financier with cloud-software money is not supposed to become the industry\u2019s biggest kingpin in the space of a few years. At least Rupert Murdoch built his thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBut the identity of this Hollywood king, for all the understandable business headlines and drama, is in a way beside the point. With the empire so bleak, you could wonder why anyone would want to rule it at all. Audiences are distracted, costs are unmanageable and automation is coming; soon, everybody who ever wrote a piece of fan fiction will be able to make a film with the push of an LLM button (as Disney just accelerated). Why own the lot when anyone can scale the gate?<\/p>\n \n\tGreen shoots will emerge and people will fight back, of course; the nature of human striving, and dare I say the Hollywood soul, is to chafe at the hegemony. But the Hollywood that any of us have known, that of a feverish machine of human-led movie studios and television networks and cable channels and, yes, streamers, all cranking out levels of newness for people to enjoy and argue about, seems for the first time in our lives not just imperiled but doomed to degradation.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd so it makes you wonder what exactly either of these would-be emperors hopes to control. Box office is wobbly, broadcast and cable television are in the sunken place, and online platforms like TikTok and YouTube regularly wipe the floor even with Netflix, as the company\u2019s own executives reminded at a Wall Street conference Monday in their (ironic) bid to seem like underdogs to federal regulators. It would be like Alexander the Great triumphantly riding into Persia only to realize the Royal Road was full of potholes. What exactly has been conquered?<\/p>\n \n\tNever mind the ways this king will be overlorded by the real emperor \u2014 less a ruler than a colonial governor. Sarandos reportedly met with Trump at the White House this month after previously meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago; Ellison sat with him in the Kennedy Center after previously sitting with him at a UFC Fight (apply your own metaphors).\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe desperate wooing of Trump-world figures has been evident with both men. Sarandos reportedly brought<\/a>\u00a0former Trump administration\u00a0official\u00a0Clete Willems to the White House meeting. Ellison\u00a0hired<\/a>\u00a0another former Trump administration official,\u00a0Makan Delrahim, as\u00a0Paramount\u2019s chief legal officer. The 42-year-old even brought on Jared Kushner\u2019s investment company to his Warners bid.\u00a0At one of the meetings between Ellison\u2019s and Trump\u2019s emissaries,\u00a0Ellison\u00a0reportedly promised<\/a>\u00a0\u201csweeping changes\u201d to CNN if somehow Trump can jury-rig Warner Bros. to him. The Hollywood throne is not Augustus but Honorius, who had to rely on a military strongman to maintain his hold on power. And in the end, Rome was sacked anyway.<\/p>\n