Why Netflix shareholders aren’t thrilled to acquire Warner Bros.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Netflix has made some hard turns before. But its latest is already causing whiplash.

In a deal announced Friday morning, Netflix will be acquiring the Warner Bros. film and TV studio business for $72 billion. That is a big price considering the entirety of Warner Bros.

Discovery was fetching a market cap just over $30 billion in early September before deal speculation began. And it is a massive move for Netflix, which has never spent more than $700 million on an acquisition. Most of that will be in cash—representing a significant outlay for a company now producing about $9 billion in annual free cash flow.

But the money is only a small part of the risk here. Buying the Warner Bros. business—once the company splits from its TV network operation later next year—portends a major shift in the Netflix business model.

The streaming pure-play would become a full-bore Hollywood studio that produces movies for theaters, and TV shows for other networks. Netflix said Friday it intends to keep running those parts of Warner Bros. That would put the company in the position of producing content for other streamers after many years of producing only for its own platform.

It also would mean Netflix, which has long been dismissive of the theatrical business, would be on the hook for spending hundreds of millions of dollars apiece to produce and market movies that could very well fall flat with audiences. And the whole world would know, as box-office tallies are public compared with the black-box nature of streaming services. All those changes are rightfully worrying to Netflix investors.