Ted Sarandos: Well, look, I think it’s a long list of reasons, but at the end of the day,
it’s a business transaction, so you have to come up with the best deal. And that’s a process we’re still in. We ultimately had the best offer. They accepted, they recommended to their Board that they approve the deal. Recently, we
opened up a seven-day window for them to revisit the ongoing Paramount deal, mostly because Paramount was continuing to try to disrupt this deal, but in ways that were not clear, so just mostly confusing to
the to the Warner Brothers shareholders. So I said, take seven days, figure out what your deal is, make sure that what’s committed and what isn’t committed, and then we’ll assess it from there. But I would say the reason why you
would do a Netflix deal versus this Paramount deal, our deal is growth. We’ve been growing and growing and growing this business since we started. We’ve been growing like in the UK, we’ve spent $6 billion original programming
in the UK since 2020, we have created 50,000 jobs in this economy. So, in the other model, in the Paramount model, it’s the classic horizontal media mergers that are always bad for consumers, always bad for creators, because basically
they’re just taking just taking is two studios and collapsing them to one. There’s five major studios left in Hollywood. If the Paramount deal were to go through, it would be four.
Amol Rajan: It’s ironic you say that because when you read all of the reporting of this deal, there’s often this narrative that Paramount
represents a kind of nostalgic romantic ideal of old Hollywood, and here comes Netflix, the disrupter, who’s the enemy of the cinema world. And it’s interesting, this isn’t necessarily just Paramount paranoia, because people like
James Cameron, who’s an icon of cinema, you must know him very well, was moved to write to the chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee to say, and I quote you, Mr. James Cameron, I believe strongly that the proposed sale of Netflix, to
Netflix will be disastrous for the theatrical motion picture business I’ve dedicated to my life’s work to. And that’s got to hurt.
Ted Sarandos: You know what it doesn’t hurt, it was quite confusing. I had personally met with James on December 20th. And we talked through our
commitment to 45-day theatrical exclusivity for the Warner Bros. slate.
Amol Rajan: It’s about
protecting cinema.
Ted Sarandos: Yeah, of course, of course, it’s what he does, it’s all he does. And if you look at it and say, and I
told him, we spent five minutes of our conversation on that, and we talked mostly about these glasses that he’s developing for Meta to have movies at home. So, to have him come out with such an impassioned statement seemed disingenuous.
Amol Rajan: So, when he says the business model of Netflix is directly at olds with the theatrical film production and exhibition business—
Ted Sarandos: Completely untrue. The best thing for our business is that people love movies and television, and the best way you love movies is just to
watch them at home, in the theaters, wherever you, wherever you want to watch them. Think about yourself as a consumer. If you go out for the night, you buy a movie ticket. You see a movie, it blows your mind. When you come home, what’s the
next thing you want to do? Watch another movie. So, for me, it’s very important, and we don’t lose any business to the movie theaters. In fact, like I said, the more people see movies, the better, deeper, richer relationship they have
with movies. And that’s a good thing. And I think by the way, it feeds both ways that Netflix, an average Netflix member watches seven movies a month. An average person, this is US, but average person in the US goes to the cinema twice a year.
So we this is, this is the lifeblood of that of this economy. And I think people know they are they are very romantically attached to the idea of going to like a movie palace and the curtain is opening and watching a movie with 2000 people. But
that’s not exactly how people are experiencing.
Amol Rajan: I guess you know, it’s not a zero sum game, you can have both in the same
place.
Ted Sarandos: One and one is five, is what I believe.
Amol Rajan: When you pay Donald Trump a visit to speak to him directly about this deal. What was the argument you made to him?
Ted Sarandos: Growth. Growth in the economy. This is a vertical merger. We’re buying assets that we don’t currently have, so we’re
buying a movie studio and a distribution entity that we don’t currently have. We’ll be adding to the market, where Paramount has committed that they’re gonna take cuts, $6 billion out of the business. right away and then de-lever that business after this deal closes. They would need to spend – cut – an additional $16 billion. So you look at that and think, wow, this industry would be much smaller under that ownership
than it would be under Netflix ownership.