Thirty years have flashed by since Enniskillen’s finest, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, released a hit single When the Lights Go Out All Over Europe, lauding the virtues of the French cinema and containing the singular chorus: “When the lights go out all over Europe/I forget about old MGM/’Cause Paramount was never Universal/And Warners went out way back when…"
It’s not many pop tunes that manage to namecheck the titans of the Los Angeles dream-machine in one nifty chorus and it would have made a convenient headline for Friday morning’s news that Netflix is on track to complete a deal to swallow up the historic Warner Bros for $82.7 billion.
The acquisition of one financial entertainment behemoth by another is not the sort of news to make people put their morning coffee down. But it feels like an enormous moment in both the past and future of the cinema age. And there is something dismal and hollow about the development.
Warner Bros has, since it was dreamed up by four Polish-American brothers in 1927, been a vital element of the United States ascension to superpower in the Twentieth Century. Its central bid was to entice the public outdoors to go to the cinema.
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Netflix, since it was dreamed up as a dvd-by-mail service in 1997, was intent on persuading society to do the opposite. Not only did you not have to go to the cinema, you didn’t even have to drag yourself down to the nearest video store any more.
Stay on the couch, let the films and TV shows come to you. Its rise to domination, through the advent of streaming, and the phenomenal success of its first original production, House of Cards (2012), has been extraordinary, with over 300 million paying subscribers as of August 2025.
All of those subscribers will have had the common experience of blankly scrolling through the tiles hoping to come across something that doesn’t feel like just more content.
With the acquisition of Warner Bros, Netflix will have access to a century of extraordinary film-making, from the first ever talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), through to the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series. If that library was to be made available to the public, then at least the world would never be stuck for a good film to watch on a wet Sunday night. But that won’t happen. Amazon acquired MGM in 2022 and nothing much changed in its range of choice.
The Warner Bros studio, in Burbank, offers tours for the dwindling number of tourists still enchanted by the history and make-believe of cinema. That will, presumably, remain for the time being. But even if Warners continues to make films, it will be owned by a streaming institution that has thrown the film industry upside down.
Justine Bateman, the former Family Ties actor turned independent film producer was unsentimental when she told The Irish Times earlier this year that “Hollywood is dead”.
All year, the reports of sluggish or no activity on the famous studio lots have been alarming. Making a living through the LA film industry, whether through acting or costume design or script writing, has never been more precarious. It remains to be seen if Netflix and other streaming giants will permit enough oxygen for new independent companies to come alive.
The 20th century Hollywood studio titans were often brutal entities and Warners was no exception, from its exploitative studio system to the friendly testimony of Jack Warner to the House of Un-American Activities to its various scandals and fallen idols down the years.
And it stood accused of further weakening the film industry when it began to release its films to its HBO service shortly after theatrical release in recent years. But what Warners does have, for all its vices and flaws, is a catalogue of extraordinary films.
And the deal has far-reaching implications: Netflix is simply after Warner’s Bros and its streaming branch, HBO. Paramount, the former Warners rival, is bitterly contesting the deal, arguing that it will also buy Warners’ cable-channel services which includes CNN, the news network.
Maybe none of this matters. The Oscars have lost their way and the idea of the “film star” seems antiquated and foolish in an era when self-curation is the great obsession and object of fandom.
But the story of the American 20th century is easily traceable through the films of those big heartless Hollywood studios, and Warners was its leading light.
The 21st will not be similarly captured by Netflix, because it cannot: the streaming service is just always there, its output dateless and its productions softened and flattened into content.
Tom French, the brilliant Irish poet, unforgettably caught the point and mystery of old Hollywood in a recent poem, Weissmuller In Age. It’s a sad, gorgeous tribute to Johnny Weissmuller, the Hungarian-born US Olympian swimmer turned star of the 12 majestic Tarzan movies produced by MGM between 1932 and 1948.
The poem opens with a quotation from The Daily Telegraph Book of Sports Obituaries which says it all: “In 1979 he was committed after complaints from the Hollywood Home for Retired Actors, where he lived, that he was upsetting the other residents by spending the night repeating his jungle call.”
