By Joe Flint
Ted Sarandos has minted his status as an entertainment power broker, but he still feels the need to tell the world that he's not trying to destroy Hollywood.
To mark the deal to acquire much of Warner Bros. Discovery for $72 billion -- even as rival suitor Paramount battled for it -- Sarandos toured the Warner Bros. studio lot this past week. He promised in a speech in Paris to keep movies in theaters. And in a memo to Netflix employees after the deal was announced, he directly addressed the question that keeps dogging him.
"Some feel this is the end of Hollywood. What's our response to that?" he and co-Chief Executive Greg Peters wrote. "We see this as a win for the entertainment industry, not the end of it."
Sarandos -- a student of Hollywood history who worked as a video-store clerk growing up -- has long sought an iconic studio property and production lot such as the sprawling Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif., according to people close to him.
It would be the capper for an executive who has at Netflix introduced radical changes that are now norms: binge viewing a season's worth of episodes at once, streaming movies instead of going to the theater, and paying creators upfront.
"He could care less about sentimental norms and traditional models," said Mark Shapiro, president of WME Group and TKO Group, parent of Ultimate Fighting Championship and World Wrestling Entertainment. He "is completely comfortable with change and evolution."
"Half the town wants to do business with him, and the other half wants an invite just to hang," Shapiro said.
Those invitations are often to Sarandos's Southern California homes, which include a residence in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and a mansion in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, that he purchased from Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi for $34 million. His neighbors there include Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, as well as Oprah Winfrey.
Sarandos declined to comment.
Whichever company ends up winning Warner is likely to face a lengthy regulatory review in the U.S. and abroad. Sarandos has met with President Trump as well as others to press his case.
Growing up in Phoenix, Sarandos, 61 years old, initially wanted to be a journalist and subscribed to out-of-town newspapers to keep up on world events, he has said in interviews.
At the same time, he became obsessed with indie films that never played in Phoenix-area theaters. His self-described "lightning-strike moment" came with a job in a Tempe, Ariz., video store, which allowed him to indulge his favorite hobby, watching movies.
He soon went from store clerk to regional distributor, quickly gaining a reputation as a sharp dealmaker. Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, who was just getting his mail-order DVD company off the ground, wooed Sarandos to join him in 2000 to oversee content, making deals for movies and TV shows.
Early on, Sarandos made the case to Hastings that Netflix needed to get into original programming, he said recently on a podcast with Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, who is also a Netflix board member. "If we want more control of our destiny, we have to have more control of our programming," Sarandos said he told Hastings.
With Sarandos's green light, Netflix signed big checks, ordering up the political drama "House of Cards," which premiered in 2013, with an unprecedented two-year, $100 million deal.
Netflix was new to original programming so it had to make bigger commitments than rivals to convince creators to sign on.
Soon other hits followed: "Orange is the New Black" (2013), "Stranger Things" (2016) and "Bridgerton" (2020). Netflix's giant stream of subscription fees allowed it to outbid rivals such as HBO. In another change to typical Hollywood practices, Netflix paid generous upfront fees to producers rather than having them participate in back-end profits.
Sarandos changed TV viewing habits by embracing binge-viewing, releasing multiple new episodes at once so subscribers no longer had to wait a week between new episodes.
He shook up the movie business in much the same way by eschewing traditional long and broad theatrical releases, which weren't consumer-friendly in his view. Traditional moviegoing is outmoded for most people, he said at a Time magazine event this year.
Sarandos has said publicly and in private that Warner Bros. would continue releasing movies in theaters under Netflix ownership.
While consumers have flocked to Netflix, Hollywood has been wary. Years ago, a studio chief famously told a staffer leaving for Netflix that the streamer was "public enemy No. 1."
Producer Greg Berlanti, whose show "You" is a Netflix hit, said Sarandos "has that old studio showman flair." He has never had a conversation with Sarandos where the Netflix chief didn't bring up what episodes he was watching or things he'd seen recently, Berlanti said.
"If something's not working, he tells you," Berlanti said, "which saves us all a lot of time."
His love of stand-up comedians led Netflix to outspend HBO and essentially take over what was seen as a niche business of comedy specials. Typical of Netflix's spending on comedians was a $40 million two-special deal for Chris Rock signed in 2016, double what HBO had been paying him, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
The embrace of stand-up has created some headaches including in 2021 when Dave Chappelle, in his special "The Closer," made remarks viewed as offensive to the transgender community. Sarandos's defense of the comedian further inflamed the situation when he said in a memo to staff that "content on screen doesn't directly translate to real-world harm." He subsequently apologized for the remarks, saying it was a "screw-up."
"What I should have led with in those emails was humanity," Sarandos said in an interview with the Journal at the time. "I should have recognized the fact that a group of our employees was really hurting."
Sarandos's overall support for Chappelle was a signal to talent that the company wouldn't back down in the face of public pressure and was prepared to be a home for content that appealed to a range of viewers.
Sarandos's Netflix is locked in a takeover battle to buy Warner's studios and streaming service HBO Max. Rival suitor Paramount launched a hostile bid for all of Warner Discovery, trying to break up Netflix's deal. Warner Discovery continues to tell shareholders it backs Netflix and formally rejected Paramount's approach this past week.
Sarandos visited the White House last month to sell President Trump on the purchase. He also made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago last year before Trump returned to office, people familiar with the matter said.
He met with Trump's Hollywood ambassador, the actor Jon Voight, and his team in the last year, discussing a federal production tax incentive, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Trump has praised Sarandos as an executive, saying he had "a lot of respect" for the Netflix boss and that he has "really done a legendary job." Trump also expressed concern about the power a combined Netflix and HBO Max would have on the streaming landscape.
Sarandos has countered that is too narrow a definition of streaming and that platforms such as TikTok and YouTube should be factored in.
"If we want more control of our destiny we have to have more control of our programming," Sarandos said on Smith's podcast in October, just weeks before the Warner bid.
Sarandos was relaying a conversation he had with Hastings about strategy, but the now-prophetic remarks telegraphed Sarandos' next big move -- acquiring the crown jewels of Hollywood and ensconcing Netflix's status as the leading entertainment company in the world.
Write to Joe Flint at Joe.Flint@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 19, 2025 22:00 ET (03:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments