In Hollywood, nobody knows anything—except me, occasionally. And right now, I know that the gloves are officially off in what might be the nastiest studio merger battle in decades.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos accused legendary director James Cameron of being "part of the Paramount disinformation campaign" regarding the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery merger with Paramount Skydance. It's the kind of quote that would've been unthinkable five years ago—a streaming executive publicly calling out cinema's most successful filmmaker as a corporate shill.
The context here matters. Cameron, who's been at Paramount developing the seemingly endless Avatar sequels, has been vocally skeptical about what a Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition would mean for theatrical releases and filmmaker autonomy. And apparently, Sarandos has had enough of it.
"There's been a lot of noise, a lot of speculation, and frankly, a lot of bad-faith arguments being made by people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo," Sarandos said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The implication is clear: Cameron, with multiple Avatar films still in Paramount's pipeline, isn't exactly an objective observer.
But here's the thing that makes this more than just executive squabbling: Cameron is right about one thing. The theatrical window does matter. His films have made over $8 billion worldwide precisely because they were theatrical events. Sarandos, for all his disruption credentials, runs a company that's spent the last decade trying to convince us that the living room is the new cinema.
The Warner Bros. Discovery-Paramount merger, if it happens, would create a studio behemoth with enormous leverage over both theatrical and streaming distribution. Netflix, despite its subscriber base, doesn't own that kind of traditional infrastructure. Which means Sarandos has every reason to be nervous—and every reason to throw elbows at anyone standing in his way.
What we're watching is the old guard (Cameron, theatrical supremacy, the idea that movies should be seen in the dark with strangers) versus the new (Sarandos, streaming dominance, the algorithm über alles). And for once, both sides have legitimate points buried under all the corporate posturing.
The "disinformation campaign" accusation is particularly rich coming from an industry built on spin, but it's also a sign of how desperate the stakes have become. Hollywood is being carved up, and the people holding the knives are getting twitchy.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything. But everybody wants to control everything. And that's when things get bloody.
