According to Fortune, former Amazon Studios chief Roy Price warned in a New York Times op-ed that a Netflix acquisition of Warner Bros. would risk creating a monopsony. He argued this “single sun” would centralize Hollywood, with every creative decision and career revolving around one entity’s gravitational pull. Price pointed out that while Netflix says Warner’s film operations will continue and HBO will be included, the danger is a reduction in competing bidders for talent. He cited the blocked Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster merger as a precedent for this kind of buyer-power concern. Opposition has also come from figures like Jane Fonda, who warned of a “constitutional crisis,” and the deal faces heavy skepticism from the Trump administration. On Wall Street, analysts like Janus Henderson’s Divyaunsh Divatia see the move as a play to amass content for a future AI-driven entertainment landscape.
The Monopsony Warning
Roy Price’s argument is pretty stark. He’s not saying Netflix would kill movies or TV. He’s saying it would fundamentally reshape the entire ecosystem into a vendor relationship. Think about it: if one company becomes the overwhelmingly dominant buyer of scripts, acting talent, directing, and VFX work, what leverage does anyone have? His “single sun” analogy is perfect. Right now, a showrunner with a bold idea can pitch to Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Apple, and maybe a few others. Each has its own development culture, taste, and appetite for risk. Consolidate two of the biggest, and suddenly you’ve sidelined a whole separate set of tastes. The bidding war dries up. And as Price bluntly puts it, that means lower compensation and narrower opportunities for everyone from writers to puppeteers. That’s the monopsony fear in a nutshell: too much power on the buyer’s side of the table.
The Giant Competitors Left Standing
Now, the counter-argument is that the remaining players are hardly mom-and-pop shops. Look at the spending. A KPMG survey cited by Variety for 2024 had Comcast spending a whopping $37 billion, YouTube at $32 billion, and Disney at $28 billion. Amazon and Netflix were at $20 billion and $17 billion, respectively. These are astronomical sums. So, wouldn’t there still be competition? Probably, but Price’s point is about concentration. It’s the difference between six major bidders and five. In an industry where projects are increasingly $200 million gambles, losing even one major check-writer at the top tier changes the calculus. It also potentially turns Netflix-Warner into a content behemoth with a library and pipeline that could be used to stifle competitors in distribution, not just production.
business-the-broader-backlash”>Beyond Business: The Broader Backlash
The business concerns are one thing, but the opposition has gotten… philosophical. Jane Fonda’s warning about a “constitutional crisis” is heavy. She’s essentially arguing that giving one private company, which will be a massive cultural curator, that much market power invites political pressure. Could a future administration lean on them to make or suppress certain content? It’s a free speech argument wrapped in an antitrust package. On the other end, you have artists like Bong Joon Ho, who, as Variety notes, doubts the cinematic experience will vanish. He might be right, but the question isn’t about extinction—it’s about influence. If the dominant player prioritizes its own algorithmic, direct-to-streaming model, what happens to the theatrical window and the kinds of mid-budget films that need it? The entire creative pipeline gets tugged in one direction.
The AI Wild Card
Here’s the thing that makes this merger feel different from media deals of the past: AI. The Wall Street take about this being a content grab for training next-gen models isn’t just analyst fluff. It’s probably a core long-term strategy. Think of Netflix-Warner as a combined entity not just as a studio, but as owning one of the world’s most valuable databases for understanding human storytelling, performance, and genre. That data is the fuel for the AI tools that will eventually help (or replace) writers, animate scenes, and maybe even generate synthetic performances. In that light, this isn’t just about controlling today’s market for talent. It’s about controlling the foundational training data for the systems that will define tomorrow’s entertainment. That adds a whole new layer of “moat” and market power that regulators are barely beginning to understand. So Price’s “single sun” warning might be more prescient than even he knows—it could be the central power source for Hollywood’s AI future, too.
