As Netflix swoops in to buy Warner Bros, we revisit the studio’s long, twisted journey
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Like all the old Hollywood studios, Warner Bros. has taken a twisted path into the present, filled with mergers and acquisitions—the latest a proposed sale to Netflix for $82.7 billion, including assumed debt.
Some have worked out well and some haven’t, but the good ones are all long in the rearview mirror. The 1950s heralded the end of the studio system of Hollywood’s Golden Era. The studios began to see competition from television, and they lost their theater chains to antitrust action by the U.S.
Department of Justice. In dire need of cash, Warner Bros. made one of the worst media deals of all time in 1956, selling off its entire pre-1948 film library just as TV stations were about to need those old movies and cartoons to fill their schedules.
Like many studios, Warner was adrift for years. As U.S. culture changed in the 1960s, Warner and the other studios had trouble keeping up, and that was the last straw.
In 1967 an aging Jack Warner still owned a controlling interest in the studio and sold it to a film distribution company named Seven Arts to form Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. But Seven Arts had bitten off more than it could chew. After a string of flops in 1968 and 1969, the company was sold to Steve Ross’s Kinney National, which owned mortuaries, parking lots, and other decidedly nonentertainment businesses.
The studio was re-christened again, this time as Warner Communications. Thus began the best years for Warner both financially and creatively since the 1930s. It had production and distribution for film, television and music as these were all burgeoning in the 1970s.
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