TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Enter the Sixth Form Chambers feat. Mattie Lubchansky

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

It’s the episode about the major media consolidation of 2025 - Paramount and Netflix are competing to feed on the corpse of Warner Bros… what’re they competing for? Why do these companies keep eating one another? Will David Ellison have enough fun playing Movies? All this, and wacky tales of kung fu teachers and more therein. Get the whole episode on Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Netflix is in this situation where it has a pretty easy time making stranger things is, but it has a very, very hard time making big blockbusters, which we'll get back to. So it also needs huge amounts of IP, most likely, to continue training the AI that it is alluded to having. So basically, by buying Warner Brothers, they can suddenly massively improve the training dataset for their IP, or AI, excuse me. Yeah. Can I just say something here, which is the whole thing is so massively to me as a person, in the creative fields and a maker of fiction. So massively frustrating to me

because they also don't allow anything. They won't even give anything a shot. I mean, let's look at the massive insane, like preposterous over the top success of K-pop demon hunters, right? A movie that would be successful IP had they put any effort into it, but they buried its release and then like after it was the most popular movie on the planet Earth for like three months, they gave it like a very perfunctory theatrical release,

but they hadn't even like sold the toy rights they'd done none of like the IP things. and it's like these companies are just not invested or interested in all in like the make like how do you get new I you can make new IP you can do it you can make stuff that is popular if you let creative people work and they just refuse to do it because it doesn't exist at the margins that tech stocks do so that they don't understand it but if we just keep betting them in a few years we can just have AI do it then it'll be fine right yeah you could have T-A-I-L-L-L-Gale tale girl tail girl tail girl Tail girl. Tail girl, yeah. That's another... Okay, so... When we said this is the T.F. Rice's room, we really weren't joking. So Paramount's claim...

We're just throwing ideas around. Yeah. So Paramount is claimed that Netflix is... They take this with a grain of salt, that Netflix's HBO combined would control 30 to 40% of the global streaming markets. Remember, HBO's owned by Warner Brothers. Netflix argues that it faces significant competition, just not from other studios, but from, like, TikTok. And that they need to do this to compete with TikTok, essentially. and like, I don't know, sleep. Yeah, their competition is the dishwasher because you're unloading the dishes.

Like, that's the, you know. Yeah. And what's insanely obvious, of course, was already said by Representative Pramela Gaiapal, who frequently comments on antitrust matters. It would mean more price hikes, more ads, more cookie cutter content, less creative control for artists and lower pay for workers all around. And that is obvious. Every single gigantic media consolidation in the last, what, God, I don't know,

100 years has largely meant that. The only thing that reversed that trend was pretty significant and excellent, worker organization in creative industries. So there are a few stories here as far as I'm concerned. Number one, the enormous record-breaking debt-fueled acquisition boom continues a pace at a time when more companies are saying since 2009, which is cool. Number two, Netflix's Journey to Dominance will hurt everybody, especially people working in the sector, especially because it will try to put AI in everything slash put everything in AI, and that will essentially like kill the movie theater as anything but a luxury destination for people who live in prestigious cities. And three,

David Ellison's competing paramount bid is being led by him and his father as Cohen Brothers characters who are utterly useless so a little background about Warner Brothers Warner Brothers Discovery as it now is known was taken over by David Zaslav in 2022 Zaselov built his empire on shitty reality TV

90-day fiancee naked and afraid these kinds of things but which basically he's been this kind of shitty company for ages he's been like a sort of dead-eyed corporate like he started as a corporate lawyer again for ages and he just cynically just took this over and was like, we're going to churn out the crappiest reality TV is pap.

No one who's a corporate lawyer could be a cynical man. Yeah, so, but as we've alluded to earlier, Warner Brothers has gone through huge numbers of mergers through the years. Time Magazine, AT&T, AOL, was AT&T Time Warner most recently. And they tried to make themselves,

because AT&T was trying to make themselves movie moguls, but like they aren't a movie studio so they weren't able to just like buy Oscars, which was an astonishing weird decision for them to make. And this is part of them being like, just joking. We're going to go back to being a communications company only. Kidding. Oh, got you. And so they own the film studio and a streaming

business, which are successful, a number of cable channels, including CNN, which are money pits. But it's not shitty in terms of making movies people want to watch. Warner Brothers isn't exactly struggling in terms of getting people to watch movies and pay for them. Barbie, Dune, Minecraft, Superman, one battle after another, the Final Destination series, sinners, weapons, the conjuring F1. All of that's Warner Brothers. All of that's the last couple. of years. They've actually weirdly had kind of a generational run, which ordinarily wouldn't cause a company to be sold. That's the kind of company that buys other companies, not the kind of company that basically strip mines itself for parts. But Zaslov is, he's a private equity guy. He thinks

like a private equity guy. That's what he does. So he's like, hey, we're up for sale. Who wants to eat our corpse? It's not even a corpse. I love to enter the room. Well, I'm cooked. He wants my stuff. And it's just like thriving 90, like 90 heart rate. Nothing wrong. with me like perfect blood pressure yeah just received great news yeah i found out i'm not a more i'm not in the mortal dracula style creature uh who wants to who wants to eat my corpse it's like because you're not experiencing like hockey stick growth forever right that's all these people know about or understand which is again as we sound the since 2008 clax on 45 times an episode here like it's that's also not how it works it's not going to work with tech forever that way and it's for some

reason the only way these people understand the world and it is so like I've been at a media company that expects that when I was like working for a nonfiction comics website that had a lot of readers and we could have been sustainable but they were just like well you're not going to be increasing your numbers over time always to make billions a year so we're not interested in you anymore and comics the comics are making millions nonfiction comics and like you know it's that thing where there's this every so often this Michael Shore quote that goes around that he was talking about it was an interview we gave from the picket line in the last writer strike where it was like this idea that the people that ran these studios used to be

evil and cynical and greedy but they had an understanding that they were like they like there was like the cultural cachet of being the movie man and now that's gone completely and it's all these tech guys who only understand like they come from a world where the product is not the product the product is the stock right um that's all they understand and they're and they're not interested in being the movie man they just see it as another fucking corpse to be bought and sold yeah whereas i think david Allison does desperately want to be like Don Simpson. He wants to be a movie man.

Well, that's because he knows Tom Cruise. That's right. And Tom Cruise has gotten his fucking movie disease into him, which is fine, cool. Getting Tom Cruise toxoplasmosis that makes me want to, like, do movies and makes me less afraid of doing stunts in which I will die. Yeah, like, as a movie person, like I, as a movie person, as a person who likes movies, as a There's a real movie cineophile over here as the sort of

Greg Turkington of Trash Future. I don't know. Like I feel like I would rather have the Ellisons buy it because they have

some you know microscopic amount of wanting to be the movie of wanting to be fucking you know Louis B. Mayer and them

like a little bit right like whereas Netflix is just like we're going to get rid of theaters by the way. Well they promise they wouldn't

and whenever a big merger deal happens and the purchasing company promises they won't change anything big about the company they're purchasing they always stick to it forever right and like you know and on the ellison's like CNN probably becomes a mouthpiece for the the fascist administration but

I'm just kind of like well it won't really make that much of a fucking difference will it actually like yeah it's like CNN was doing the good work out here so david ellison has made some announcements as to how he wants to run warner brothers which we will get to oh good okay Batman's gonna be in mission impossible think about it so but yeah I'd say this deal is old time movie magic Paramount Skydance basically being saying like they were seen initially as well this is our deal to lose like we're definitely we think we're in with a chance because we have the administration connections we have the infinite money of my dad behind us who wants me to have like a special a special birthday and you know when you're 42 you need like a little help you know what what 42 year old ever bought a major motion picture studio without like a little help from their parents I'm just glad he's being upfront about it but it's meant that David Ellison and his father Larry visited David Zaslovav at his home three times, each time making a new hire offer and each time being rebuffed. It seemed like there was nothing they could do to get David Zaslav on board, partly because David Ellison is like a world historically unappealing person to spend any time with,

and David Zaslov would still work at whatever the new company is. Like, that's very explicit in the contract. This issue escalated. Paramount says it chased Warner Brothers for months with ever richer bids, personal appeals, private dinners, only to be stonewalled every time. A person close to the company said, quote, Paramount was being gaslit from start to finish. No matter what answers Paramount provided, Warner kept finding excuses to say it wasn't enough and then just started ghosting us. I now have a number of texts sent by David Ellison to David Zasloff.

Just tried calling you about the new bid we've submitted. I heard you on all your concerns and believe we've addressed them in our new proposal. Give me a call back when you can and we can discuss in detail. No response. Dived. David spelled wrong. I appreciate your underwater today. so I wanted to send you a quick text.

No, despite the noise of the last 24 hours, I have nothing but respect and admiration for you and your company. No response. It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to be the owner of these iconic assets with you. If we have the privilege to work together, you will see that my father and I are the exact same people you had dinner with.

No response. Oh, boy. This is kind of sad now. Yeah. Parassocial relationships can strike at any time. also it's like larry ellison has no official role at skydance no official role at paramount but it's like no no it will be me and my dad of course uh anyway ellison followed up one more time saying paramount had offered a package that covered all the issues warner had raised issue and including the need

for strong cash value and the speed to close because basically um paramount has the ellison's money behind it and and um connections of the administrations they were like we will not need to wait we won't need to net water brother shareholders won't need to wait to get paid this is when Netflix arrives in the scene.