Hello and welcome to Little Gold Men,

Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers.

I'm Rebecca Ford.

And I'm John Ross.

So we've got some big news this week.

Netflix is out of the bidding war for Warner Brothers. Paramount has made the winning

bid of a whopping $111 billion, and Netflix said, we're done. We're bowing out. So what have you

been hearing about this since the news broke on Friday? I mean, this is major, and people are freaked out.

I mean, it's so funny.

We talked about this before when Netflix was, you know, the frontrunner, I guess,

and purchasing Warner Brothers and the fear about theatrical.

But then Ted Sarandos basically spent a month-long PR campaign to assuage the fears about

theatrical specifically, I mean, about a bunch of stuff and about why their bid to buy Warner Brothers

was better for the industry. And personally, I believe them. I felt it was

pretty compelling. And then with this last minute, switcheroo, which Rebecca, you always thought was coming.

I did. You were adamant that David Ellison wasn't going to back down and he was

going to get this studio because he really wants it. I think now there's real fear about redundancies

in the industry and people losing their jobs and just how these two studios will merge and still

keep their identities when you have things like Paramount Plus but also a brand like HBO.

Now, today, David Ellison said that he's going to keep HBO, HBO, but he's going to

combine the two streaming platforms, which that we sort of knew was coming.

But it's chaotic is the only way to describe it, don't you feel?

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