When you turn on your television, how do you decide what to watch first? YouTube, Netflix and Disney+ are among the most popular individual video platforms. But the growing answer dictating your TV selections may very well be Roku, Amazon Fire and Apple TV. Why? Because these companies are controlling distribution, not just content programming. All three operating systems house the streaming services and apps we use daily. That’s what makes Fox’s acquisition of Roku so compelling. It’s a bet one level up from the streaming wars. Rather than competing directly with Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max, Lachlan Murdoch is moving to own the monetizable distribution layer of entertainment alongside Amazon and Apple. 

Earlier in the streaming wars, individual services fought over content. Everyone wanted the biggest shows that built the largest subscriber bases. Netflix’s Stranger Things, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys—breakout originals that attracted new customers en masse. The all-consuming cultural maw of HBO’s Game of Thrones spurred rivals to throw tens of millions of dollars at splashy IP. Marvel, Star Wars, DC and Lord of the Rings. 

These programming skirmishes are still ongoing, but on a smaller scale. As the industry matures, focus has somewhat shifted away from individual content lineups and towards controlling discovery, recommendations and placement. That’s where real power and value lie. Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Walmart’s Vizio are all operating systems that house the YouTubes, Netflixes and Disney+s of the world. Those watching Paramount+’s Landman or HBO Max’s The Pitt are likely doing so via one of those companies’ devices. 

Imagine the TV operating systems are like properties in Monopoly, and the individual streamers and apps that consume our attention are the houses and hotels built atop them. It’s easy to see where leverage is hoarded in that dynamic. (Investors remain more wary as Fox shares fell 18 percent in the first hour after the deal was announced, and Roku stock slipped 1 percent).

How Fox is leveling up

The further we move away from the 2010s, the clearer it becomes that Fox slimmed down in order to beef up. This Roku acquisition is the loudest evidence yet. 

On the micro side, it gives the company a strong foothold in the small but growing world of free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST). Combined, Fox’s Tubi (2.2 percent) and Roku’s The Roku Channel (3.0 percent) account for monthly U.S. TV screen viewing time that’s within spitting distance of Disney+ (5.3 percent), according to Nielsen’s The Gauge. (However, the one-third overlap between the two audiences, or viewers who use both, would reduce the combined total somewhat.) One quarter of Roku Channel viewing comes from home-screen tile placement, while the other 75 percent comes from search and discovery. The combination of all of Fox’s distribution, Roku and Tubi positions the company as the third-largest connected TV distributor in the U.S., per Nielsen. 

But Roku isn’t just another streaming service. At the macro level, it’s a front door to all of streaming. Transactional video on demand (one-time rental or purchase of titles) and third-party subscription marketplaces (signing up for streamers available on these apps) are lucrative businesses. “Amazon Channels is, by all accounts, the largest distributor of streaming services with close to 100 million subscriptions globally, from which they take a commission,” Owl & Co founder Hernan Lopez wrote in his Streamonomics newsletter. Fox is clearly chasing a similar quarry. 

As I previously covered, Fox sold its entertainment assets to hyper-focus on sports, news, Tubi and the growing creator economy. In what may or may not be a sign of the fragmented future, abandoning blockbusters for passionate niches has worked. The stock is up 33 percent over the last five years. But the model was heavily reliant on the rapid decline of linear TV. This move takes a unique angle on streaming that’s more meaningful than Fox One and Fox Nation. 

Is there now an argument to be made that Fox is the best-positioned legacy media company thanks to a slimmed-down content focus and owning highly valuable consumer on-ramps? Roku, Amazon, Apple and Vizio have figured out how to let programming from rival companies deliver money into their own coffers.

Quietly winning the streaming wars

I previously argued Sony won the streaming wars by sitting it out. Fox largely did too, saving itself billions in the process. The biggest differentiator now? After assuming control of Roku, Fox is poised to take a bite out of its competitor’s subscription and advertising revenue. 

Roku typically takes around 20 percent of every third-party subscription sold or in-app purchase made through its OS, and an advertising cut of roughly 30 percent. (Apple famously collects 15-30 percent from TVOD). So the company makes money every time, say, a Dove ad pops up on Hulu or you subscribe to HBO Max through its system. With more than 100 million global households using Roku, few rivals, if any, can afford to abandon the service.

As we’ve seen across the industry in recent years, subscriber growth is harder to come by. That’s partly because the streaming audience is becoming more homogenous, according to data from Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. Since 2024, streaming-exclusive viewers who don’t use linear TV have grown older, more female, less diverse and less engaged. That makes content discovery more important than ever. 

Hollywood has spent a decade trying to catch and beat Netflix on the assumption that becoming the default destination is the only way to survive. Fox is betting that it might be more lucrative to own the bridge that gets you there. 

In a world in which the combined media rights value for North America’s Big Four sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) currently eclipses $15 billion annually, bargain hunters must beware. The 2026 World Cup may be the last major sports broadcast deal secured at a real discount. And that might just be the first domino in a problematic chain reaction for Hollywood. 

Back in 2015, Fox was able to extend U.S. World Cup rights through this year for a pittance. Yet, that is exactly why the next round of negotiations is expected to produce fireworks. Sports rights are the last vestige of consistent mass-audience appeal on linear television and the best way to engage high-risk subscribers and juice ad-supported tiers on streaming. But with every new envy-inducing deal that crosses the finish line, the entertainment ecosystem is forced to contract. 

How Fox landed the deal of the century

The 2022 World Cup Final between France and Argentina was watched by around 1.5 billion people. So how in the world is Fox only paying $485 million for this year’s cushy U.S.-held tournament when the rights are estimated to be worth more than three times that amount? 

Over the decades, FIFA has cultivated a reputation as a financial shark always on the hunt for the best meal. In doing so, it agreed in 2014 to hold the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the New York Times reported. Yet the nation’s hot climate wasn’t conducive to the tournament’s usual summer schedule. So FIFA offered Fox a rights deal through 2026 in exchange for not challenging the shift to fall, when the broadcast network knew the World Cup would have to compete with the NFL, College Football and the NBA. A mere concession in the moment transformed into laughably monumental value in the present day. 

Neither FIFA nor Fox knew 10 years ago that the 2026 games would be held in the U.S. with an expanded 48-team roster, following years of domestic soccer growth and a ballooning market for live sports rights. All of these factors turned this year’s games into the deal of the century. Yet it’s set the stage for a massive price hike in future World Cup negotiations that aligns with broader recent sports broadcast trends. 

The World Cup’s value has exploded because networks and platforms are desperate for events that draw tens of millions of viewers to justify higher ad rates. Most of the “good stuff” has migrated to streaming, and attention spans are more fractured than the San Andreas Fault (yes, I did just drop a geology joke). 

Scarcity, FOMO, impulse buying and other factors have created a consistent trend: viewers are more likely to buy an advertised product while watching a live event, such as a sporting event. Annual ad spending on sporting events is expected to reach roughly $25 billion by 2030. That’s a lot of money—and it isn’t the only backdrop that makes the World Cup bargain so astonishing. Recent data from Antenna proves that live spectacle such as Netflix’s NFL broadcasts consistently attracts a greater share of “light viewers,” or households that watch the least on a given platform, than the baseline. That’s powerful. 

The rest of the sports market is famously moving in the opposite direction. The crowning example is professional football. Annual combined NFL rights cost around $10 billion at the moment, accounting for 31 percent of all sports media rights and 8 percent of all content spend (film, TV, sports rights, etc.), per State of the Screens. Amidst ongoing renegotiations, that total number is expected to rise by another $6 billion or so in the next round of deals. That’s all well and good for the NFL, but all that new money has to come from somewhere. Therein lies the rub. 

The real cost of sports deals

Every additional cent spent on the NFL, World Cup, NBA, College Football and the UFC is money taken from another division’s budget. In layman’s terms, that means less money to go around for other programming. 

The NFL’s price hike is expected to result in an estimated 7 percent reduction in scripted TV, film and other content allocations. In the words of Puck News’ John Ourand, the new NFL media deals are “widely expected to suck billions out of the pool of money available for lesser sports properties, not to mention Hollywood entertainment budgets.” He describes it as a “blast radius.”

This moves the economic reality from conceptual bean-counting to tangible winners and losers. In theory, this may prevent the Disneys of the world from delivering the next Shogun. This partially speaks to the decline in Netflix original volume as the streamer allocates more money towards sports: multiple NFL games, WWE, MLB’s opening night, Home Run Derby and Field of Dreams game, the 2027 and 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup, combat sports, etc. Why spend enormous sums of money on original question marks when sports deliver a proven guarantee? 

Fox obviously won the negotiation for the 2026 World Cup and will reap enormous benefits as a result. But after taking this lump, FIFA is well-positioned for the future. Fox knows its deal of the century is on borrowed time. NBC knows what the World Cup property should be worth. So do Amazon, Apple and Netflix. 

The next round of negotiations will be made with the media landscape of the 2030s firmly within the scope of dealpoint discussions. That world is defined by the scarcity, high demand and soaring value of live sports rights. This could be the last sports bargain to be had for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, that might mean Hollywood needs to be worried about what it will be forced to sacrifice to fund the next round of media deals.

I love that classic old Looney Tunes bit where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck argue back and forth about whether it’s rabbit-hunting season or duck-hunting season. Their mutual goal is to avoid the wrath of Elmer Fudd’s shotgun. Any argument can and will be made to keep them alive. Strangely, that 1951 scene is eerily reflective of today’s Hollywood. Every stakeholder in the entertainment industry—studios, movie theaters, streamers—is working toward different goals. That means they all have different definitions of success. Coupled with Hollywood’s unparalleled PR spin, a consensus is hard to reach as a result. 

Hits still exist, but every success story comes with asterisks, caveats and qualifiers. Box office hovers around 15 percent below pre-pandemic levels globally and roughly 20 percent domestically. From 2014 to 2019, 28 Hollywood films crossed the $1 billion mark at the box office. In the last five years, as of this writing? Only 11. Streaming success can be measured and argued via endless Beautiful Mind-esque permutations. Total hours viewed, total views, unique households, completion rates, subscriber acquisition and retention, engagement among high-risk users…I need an Ambien just thinking about it. 

No one can agree on which metric matters most. 

As Comscore head of marketplace trends Paul Dergarabedian told Observer, “It depends who you’re talking to—audience, studio, theaters, financiers. What is their north star in terms of what they deem successful?”

Success then vs. now

Despite the best efforts of infamous Hollywood accounting, success has been fairly straightforward throughout cinema’s history. A movie was released, ticket sales were counted, and the marketplace delivered a verdict. Bob’s your uncle. 

The 2010s, when annual domestic box office topped $11 billion in five consecutive years, were especially easy to read. Opening weekend and total gross relative to budget were widely accepted evaluation tools.  

Similarly, the early streaming gold rush revolved around relatively binary equations. Through mid-2022, Wall Street rewarded Netflix for consistent subscriber growth. The streamer’s quarterly gains were enthusiastically covered by the media like a draft list for the rapture (I was guilty as well). It was an easy and exciting narrative to peddle. 

Yet neither framework applies as cleanly as it once did. As TVRev founder and media analyst Alan Wolk notes, “The industry has never had the patience to let a show or movie find an audience. They demand instant metrics,” he told Observer. 

Studio success = lifecycle monetization

Home entertainment, such as VHS and DVD, long served as a financial safety net. This market’s collapse, coupled with Hollywood’s increasing fragmentation, has elevated the importance of multi-window success. 

Digital and streaming claw back value in new ways. Sony’s Madame Webb flopped at the box office, but was the studio’s most-watched film on Netflix in 2024. F1: The Movie was a box office hit, but never made Nielsen’s Top 10 weekly streaming charts. Greenland 2: Migration struggled in theaters, yet ranks in the Top 10 for digital rental/purchase across Amazon, Apple TV, Google and Rakuten TV as of this writing, per FlixPatrol. Theatrical whiffs can become streaming hits. Streaming flops can be licensed externally. Around and around it goes as studios must evaluate a longer performance lifecycle to understand a given title’s contributions. 

Avengers-level hits move the needle more than anything. But at the studio level, success often comes from maximizing potential across as many windows as possible rather than dominating just one.

Streaming success = retention

Streaming growth has slowed considerably in recent years. Plenty of streaming performance data exists. But context doesn’t. 

Samba TV recently announced that the first episode of Apple’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles was watched by 1.2 million U.S. households, yet no timeframe was given, as Entertainment Strategy Guy pointed out. Netflix boasted in its latest Engagement Report that non-English programming accounts for more than a third of all global viewing. Yet viewership of top non-English shows pales in comparison to that of their English counterparts. 

Data-driven arguments decrying failure and declaring success are easy to conjure. For example, the studio behind Show A announced that it drew 7.5 million viewers in its first five days, while Show B has never made a Nielsen streaming list in two seasons. Which would you rather have? Trick question, they’re both Daredevil: Born Again. The industry has yet to standardize a clean evaluation rubric. 

Data from Digital i shows that around one-third of 2025 streaming viewership was driven by customers at a greater risk of canceling their subscriptions due to low usage. At the same time, only a minority of elite shows manage to grow their audience season over season. Title-level ratings are still massively important. Shows don’t get renewed if their viewership doesn’t justify the budget. But overall platform success has less to do with a single show’s performance and more with what viewers do after watching. 

Wolk hits on what executives really want to see: “The most important metric is one that is notoriously hard to measure—attention. In the fragmented world of feudal media, it is not how many people see your series or movie, but how passionate they are about it.” 

A small, intentional audience, even at a high risk of cancellation, can be more valuable under the right circumstances than a large audience of passive consumers. Macro success now orbits retention, churn reduction, and sustained engagement rather than raw reach and growth at all costs. 

Exhibitor success = stability

Movie theater owners loved Barbenheimer. But you know what they love even more than one outsized weekend flanked by uncertainty? Consistency. 

Exhibitors protect against the downside by programming for predictability. The opening weekend is still crucial. But according to Dergarabedian, it is not necessarily the most important metric. 

“The most accurate measure of success is how long it stays in the top five or top ten, how it holds up week-over-week,” he said. “It’s a direct reflection of how the audience feels about the film.”

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania...We’ve seen huge openings followed by cataclysmic drops that cut box office legs and ruined narratives. Exhibitors will trade the volatility of massive potential for the guarantee of steady health. Once again, their definition of success differs from their partners. 

The cost

Why does this lack of a uniform understanding even matter? It’s not just the cloudiness of post-performance analysis on our end. Without mutually agreed upon benchmarks of success, decision-making that powers the creative across development, budgeting, distribution and beyond can be misaligned. 

Studios need titles with hit potential across every window. Exhibitors eye films that deliver guaranteed results. Streamers want to keep you in their digital ecosystems for as long as possible. Marketing departments try to whip viewers into an opening-weekend frenzy. Sony laments a box-office bomb, while Netflix may rejoice. Different departments are working toward different goals all at the same time. If no one can agree on what constitutes a success, all you may have is a recipe for failure. 

“It would be lovely to say opening weekends don’t matter,” Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s film school, told Variety in 2024. Unfortunately, Hollywood hasn’t found an alternative yet. The economics of moviemaking dictate that many films with hearty budgets must open big to set the tone of the discourse and start the difficult march toward profitability on the right foot. But that systemic structure may actually be capping audience interest overall. The opening weekend has become too much of an exclamation point instead of an ellipsis for the fate of films. 

Box office forecasting and reporting have become a dense galaxy of their own within the film industry universe. Opening weekend predictions, Thursday night previews, Friday-through-Sunday holds, second weekend drops, domestic multipliers, etc. Every element of performance is canvassed and cataloged like a professional sport. We know that wide releases are largely judged in the first 72 hours. We know that marketing budgets shrink to next to nothing post-release, depending. Meanwhile, smaller movies may see their screen count cut dramatically after quiet opening weekends. By that time, a public narrative had already taken hold and prematurely squashed potential. 

Why is the opening weekend important? 

Hollywood sees opening weekend as an immediate signal of urgency or apathy. But really, it’s more of an audience trigger. Strong openings lead to more positive WOM and more screen availability. This results in greater visibility, which supports a sustained box office run. Weak openings are like fatal cascading effects: They generate negative narratives, which reduce screen count, which hurts discoverability, which tanks box office. That isn’t a measure of performance. It’s the director of it. It creates a self-fulfilling catch-22. 

At play here is a challenging reality for movie theater owners. They prefer to reduce risk and protect against the downside rather than chase upside. The business is built on increasingly thin margins and reduced screen count post-COVID. Short-term weekly performance stability is more important than what a film could earn long-term.

Traditional audience tracking exacerbates the problem. It’s national and opaque. It isn’t designed to answer how the film tastes of the northeast and southwest might diverge, or how infrequent moviegoers can be enticed into theaters. 

In this system, the opening weekend becomes a do-or-die dart throw for smaller films angling for a platform release (gradually increasing their screen count as word of mouth builds). Screen expansion is often dependent on financial performance. So exhibitors will tell smaller distributors that they will add a limited release if it performs well on opening weekend. But limited screens make it difficult for audiences who may be interested to find a showing, which suppresses demand and ticket sales. The inevitable soft opening that results erases any chance of expansion in week two. 

If the industry requires proof of concept, but doesn’t create an environment to deliver it, then the system is designed for failure. In a healthier industry, a film’s debut should serve more as a snapshot instead of the entire picture. The overarching trajectory is more important. 

Anyone But You ($6 million opening en route to $88 million domestic), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish ($12.4 million opening, $186 million domestic), Smile ($22.6 million opening, $105 million domestic), Where the Crawdads Sing ($17 million opening, $90 million domestic), Elemental ($29.6 million opening, $154 million domestic)…There are a number of post-COVID releases that opened relatively modestly but legged it out to impressive totals. These aren’t just one-off exceptions. They are examples of how movies can still cultivate active interest beyond opening weekend when given the space to breathe. 

Who did the system hurt?

Prestige pictures, adult-skewing dramas, movies aimed at older demographics, non-IP films—there are countless genres and movie types that are facing steeper uphill battles as a result of opening-weekend hyperfixation. These movies historically succeeded on slow-burning footprint expansions. Today, they are classified as failures before they’ve been given the opportunity to build. 

As Chapman University’s Galloway noted, some blockbusters carry costs so enormous they require massive upfront revenue to achieve any semblance of ROI. Opening under expectations can create negative narratives that hurt films early on in release, even if the quality and legs are there. Remember the whole Sinners coverage fiasco? 

Streaming films are not immune either. They recreate a similar problem in which homepage real estate, Top 10 carousels, and recommendation algorithms are designed for early visibility and sampling (even though market leader Netflix prioritizes viewership within the first 90 days). There’s little post-release strategy for reaching and activating audiences once these titles are replaced by the latest batch of originals. Recommendation algorithms are built on viewing history. So accounts largely interested in, say, romance may never be properly exposed to an action release. 

Marketing is still too focused on broad reach at the expense of the core audience. When target demos are emphasized, studios (and especially streamers) often don’t have the money and/or care to target secondary audiences that might also be interested. In fact, Hollywood ignores the upside of paradoxical audiences, a term my firm Greenlight Analytics uses to describe audiences who hold contradictory views, values or behaviors that defy categorization. 

For example, there are an estimated 2.1 million what Greenlight calls “adult arthouse Republicans” in the U.S., or conservative voters who consume foreign or indie film, and 5.4 million R-rated viewers with family values, or religious parents who consume mature content. These are sizable audiences that represent millions in lost box office potential. They aren’t primary opening weekend pre-release targets, and there’s little in the way of post-debut targeting.

The pandemic forced Hollywood to experiment with shorter theatrical windows, aggressively so in some cases. Yet the major studios are returning to longer stays in movie theaters. Why? Because the audiences are there. Hollywood just needs to keep looking after the opening weekend. 

Between 2019 and 2023, Netflix released several hundred movies each year. The company cannonballed into the deep end of original film to secure validation as the new industry interloper. But under Dan Lin, who took over as the streamer’s head of film in 2024, Netflix is changing its course. In the first three months of 2026, the most popular subscription streamer on the planet released “just” 23 original movies—that’s a prodigious volume compared to legacy studios, but an eight-year low for Netflix. Executives are conceding to an overlooked truth: streaming doesn’t reward original movies the way the industry once assumed it would.

The reality was that many of Netflix’s films came and went without any real impact. Roughly one in four movies (original and licensed) garnered 100,000 or fewer viewership hours per quarter from 2023 to 2025, barely registering with audiences.

Historically, successful movies on streaming cause mad dashes of viewership before fading. Longer TV series, on the other hand, sustain engagement and drive better retention. A never-ending flow of movies sounds like an addictive prospect on paper. But they rarely live up to the hype, especially against their theatrical counterparts. 

Comparing nine Netflix movies to 11 films released in theaters at the same pre-release point yields a consistent gulf between the two. Theatrical movies scored better in Awareness, Interest, Theatrical Intent, Willingness to Pay and other measures of demand, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. That’s not an indictment of Netflix’s quality, but a reflection of consumer sentiment. Straight-to-streaming movies start from a lower baseline and decay faster. 

What the data shows

Long-running series with massive episode libraries unsurprisingly generate the most time spent in the scripted streaming world (procedurals, sitcoms, kids’ entertainment). 

Here are the 10 most-watched licensed series in the U.S. last year, per Nielsen: Bluey, Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, SpongeBob SquarePants, Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, The Big Bang Theory, Law & Order: SVU, Criminal Minds and The Rookie. I can’t tell you how often I have sitcoms on in the background while I eat lunch, fold laundry or zone out during all-hands Zoom meetings in which I never once unmute myself. 

The average minutes watched for these shows in 2025 was a whopping 33 billion, per Nielsen. The average of the Top 10 streaming originals? 18.2 billion. Both TV totals still dwarf the averages of the top 10 kids movies (7.4 billion) and general audience movies (4.91 billion). 

TV is a habit. Movies on streaming are, for the most part, a moment. 

Netflix’s course correction

Netflix’s reduced film volume isn’t just about content budgets and ROI. It’s an acknowledgment that the streaming business model is built more on TV than film. There’s a reason McDonald’s fries sell better than their McChickens. Netflix’s TV library has generated more audience demand than its film library in every single quarter since 2022, per Parrot Analytics, which tracks piracy viewership and social activity.

Theatrical movies making their streaming debut are often first selections when logging on, especially among Gen Z. That’s valuable. Original streaming films can be select event-driven releases that feed into one another. January’s The Rip spent seven weeks in Netflix’s global top 10s, leading into March’s War Machine, which has remained in the Top 10 for five straight weeks since release as of this writing. That’s just good old-fashioned quality scheduling. (The action genre consistently performs on streaming.)

Films will always be crucial to culture. But they’re less efficient in a subscription model. Red Notice (118 minutes) carried a $200 million budget and was watched for at least 454.2 million hours. All three seasons of Squid Game (22 episodes totaling 21.37 hours) reportedly cost just $91.4 million. The show has been watched for approximately 4.48 billion hours. The Night Agent Season 1 reportedly cost up to $30 million and generated 803.2 million viewing hours. Longer runtimes also create more advertising inventory, a top priority in Los Gatos. 

Last year, three of the top five Netflix titles watched by low-usage global subscribers at the greatest risk of cancellation were TV series (Squid Game Season 2, American Primeval, Squid Game Season 1), per Digital i. (Original films Carry-On and Back in Action were also in the top five). That same study also revealed that just one movie, KPop Demon Hunters, ranked in the Top 15 acquisition-driving titles across Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

You tell me which is the better investment overall. 

Netflix is (rightly) not abandoning movies; it’s just right-sizing its content strategy, especially as live events and sports chew up more of its budget. Streaming rewards extended stays, not momentary fly-bys. Film will always be the best medium for launching financially lucrative multimedia franchises that spawn TV extensions. Netflix knows this better than most as the home to Cobra Kai, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, XO, Kitty, two different Jurassic World kids series, two different Boss Baby series, and many more. 

Streaming didn’t remotely kill movies. It just reduced their importance inside the new business model. Netflix is simply adapting its strategy based on the results. 

Famously or infamously, 20th Century Fox sold its entertainment assets to The Walt Disney Company in 2019 to focus on news and sports. With a stripped-down operation, industry observers would be forgiven for believing it was the last time Fox would be a relevant media force. But to paraphrase the same studio’s iconic Independence Day, they opted not to go quietly into the night. 

While legacy media fights over franchises, New Fox has been betting on the creator economy. January’s deal between Fox Entertainment and YouTuber Dhar Mann Studios (163 million followers, 20 billion views across platforms for his scripted long-form content) to create a video slate of microdramas is a microcosm of the company’s strategy. Acquisitions of free ad-supported streaming TV service (FAST) Tubi in 2020 and one-stop-shop digital media company Red Seat Ventures last year make it clear where Fox is aiming. The question is whether or not the target is worth hitting. 

Betting on creators to drive the future of entertainment

As Observer previously reported, early versions of Superman (2034), Batman (2035), Joker (2036) and Wonder Woman (2037) are entering the public domain in the next 15 years. They’re not the only examples. It’s a reminder that studio reliance on major franchise IP must contend with mounting external competition, including from creators gaining access to famous faces. Fox, having sold its IP library, is trying to build something different, especially with NFL rights siphoning off more than 25 percent of Fox’s annual content spend. 

Tubi accounts for 2.1 percent of U.S. TV time, more than Peacock (1.8 percent) and WBD’s streaming operations (1.4 percent), per Nielsen. The service earned chest-pounding moments when it became profitable in Q3 2025, surpassed 100 million-plus monthly active users (MAUs), and reached $1 billion in annual revenue. While its impressive catalog of Hollywood content is a driving force, the FAST library also consists of 16,000 episodes of creator content. This ranges from non-exclusive licensed feeds of MrBeast to scripted original entertainment featuring popular creators such as TikToker Noah Beck’s Sidelined, which became the platform’s most-watched title. 

“Viewers want long-form entertainment that is built more on authenticity and cultural relevance than big stars,” Tubi CEO Anjali Sud said at an event hosted by Paley Media Council in New York in March. 

Working in the service’s favor: most FASTs prioritize pre-scheduled linear-like channel surfing, while Tubi has emphasized its on-demand element. In that way, it’s become a notable free ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) service behind YouTube. Creator-driven content hasn’t exactly become must-see for the mainstream outside of kids media (even Amazon’s Beast Games is more of a ratings base hit than a home run), but passionate niches can help justify properly budgeted programming here.

“It’s not always about the size of their reach. It’s about the depth and passion of the fandom,” Sud said of creators without legions of followers still driving solid viewership on Tubi. 

The potential of the creator-activated audience 

There does exist an audience for creator content across mediums. YouTube boasts 202 million U.S. adult users that are 7 percent more likely than the average consumer to be streaming viewers, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. Nearly 98 percent of Gen Z TikTokers also use YouTube. The platforms don’t compete; they share, making it easier to target for businesses. 

These are monetizable audiences (with a caveat, which we’ll get to). Around 38 percent of consumers say they sometimes or often make purchases based on influencer recommendations. There are 6.6 million young social media-driven moviegoers who are significantly more likely to be influenced by creators and subscribe to multiple streamers. Creator recommendations function as cultural currency for this group. It is the cordless audience Fox is going after. 

The second side of the company’s influencer push is Red Seat Ventures, which helps creators build direct-to-consumer media businesses. Both conservative-leaning public figures who have left traditional media and standard creators have opted to launch efforts with Red Seat. The company was acquired by Fox in 2025. 

Red Seat has engineers who will build home studios for creators to be coordinated by remote control rooms. They provide editing and marketing services, an ad sales team, and general talent development and management. The company emphasizes “creator monetization” above all else, CEO Chris Balfe said on the same panel with Sud last month. That’s video and audio podcast revenue, short-form content, branded content, subscriptions, off-platform ventures, etc. Balfe argues that the benefit of the D2C model vs standard Hollywood is that it empowers the talent themselves to “control the destiny long-term. You own it.” 

Red Seat cultivates relationships and business foundations, while Tubi provides an incremental audience. 

Where’s the real money in the creator economy?

But is there enough money to be made in the creator economy to justify such deliberate attention? There are arguments to be made both ways. 

Linear TV still generates more than $120 billion in annual U.S. revenue, while FAST revenue is projected to hit “just” $17 billion by 2029. It’s growing, but streaming is not expected to replicate the generous economics of pay-TV. Migrating audiences from creator-led platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.) to these expanding corporate destinations is another headache entirely. A consistent conversion funnel has yet to be built. 

Creators themselves are not spared from the universal law that shapes traditional entertainment: content is a historically top-heavy game. Only 4 percent of creators earn at least $100,000 annually, while half of all creators make less than $500 per month. Media analyst Doug Shapiro argues that fewer than 1 percent of creator content accounts account for 99 percent of revenue.

“It’s still early among Fortune 100 companies,” Sud said of creator economy advertising among top brands. “Madison Avenue is pretty traditional.” Red Seat serves top-tier creators only, as long-tail revenue democratization hasn’t materialized for lower-tier creators.

One clear hurdle is attribution. Advertisers understandably want to know their campaigns are reaching and activating the right audiences before shifting big dollars. While streaming offers more personalization opportunities than linear, formally tracking this sort of cause-and-effect remains tricky outside of affiliate links. Media spending on internet-connected TVs can be infamously inefficient. 

Then there’s the audience wealth gap. Yes, social media consumers are willing to spend. But 52 percent of adult TikTok users in the U.S. have a household annual income under $50,000, per Greenlight. This speaks to its younger-skewing audience. Until a more direct throughline to higher-earning audiences can be established, upper-echelon advertisers may remain wary.

There’s a logic behind opting out of the battle between the 37th Marvel Cinematic Universe film and the 12th Fast & Furious franchise installment. After failing to acquire Warner Bros. in the 2010s, Fox patriarch Lachlan Murdoch took stock of the deep-pocketed tech companies sniffing around Hollywood and decided enough was enough. 

Now, Fox’s bet is smaller-scale differentiation—swapping in creator-connected content for the blockbuster-IP model. The audience does exist, and is growing. But ad dollars are volatile, as the infrastructure is still developing, and we don’t yet know how scalable passionate niches can be. Can my favorite pop culture sketch comic or NFL analyst TikTokers support dedicated channels on different mediums? Time will tell if the monetary opportunity will catch up to the ambition. Fox is betting the gap between the audience and business model will continue to shrink. I’m betting it’ll be fun to watch either way. 

Picture this: elevated fashion wowing onlookers with immediate trend-setting appeal. A who’s who collection of star-power shining so brightly that someone should warn NASA. No, I’m not talking about the recent Academy Awards. I’m talking about May’s The Devil Wears Prada 2. The highly-anticipated legacy sequel, which is already tracking like a surefire hit, arrives 20 years after the original. But what’s even more impressive than the attractive ensembles adorning its original cast is how the film serves as a microcosm for an important trend.

Franchise fatigue is a real threat in Hollywood, but often misdiagnosed. The Devil Wears Prada 2 exists because there is still enduring demand for the original despite two decades without any continuations. Meanwhile, a meaningful portion of audiences say they’re no more likely to watch new entries from long-running active franchises like Marvel (36 percent), Game of Thrones (49 percent), The Walking Dead (54 percent), according to Hub Entertainment Research. The audience issue isn’t with general franchises. It’s with franchises they consider to be oversaturated and creatively exhausted. (With all due respect to the absolutely fantastic A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Wonder Man).

In a market that’s been far too concentrated on the same small handful of franchises for years, The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels like a breath of fresh nostalgic air rather than bloated overexposure.

I asked Parrot Analytics to compare the most in-demand film/TV concepts that haven’t released a new installment in at least 10 years to the top active franchises. The gap between the former (20 times more in-demand than the average title) and the latter (24.6x) was much smaller than expected, suggesting inactive IP can rival in-the-moment franchises.

Standout examples included LOST (the 34th most in-demand TV series globally), Interstellar (4th among films), The Truman Show (20th) and Inception (24th). The TV side of the equation was dominated by genre storytelling (LOST, Hannibal, Person of Interest, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate)—exactly what fatigued episodic franchises used to deliver well. (It’s worth noting that a recent Buffy revival was scrapped by Hulu). On the film side, the aforementioned high-concept and sci-fi titles mixed with historical epics (Troy) and war stories (Black Hawk Down) are among the leaders.

It’s not as if Christopher Nolan is returning for sequels anytime soon. But studios can build out these worlds with creatively justifiable continuations. Many of these titles have remained in the cultural consciousness not just through sheer quality, but optimal placement in a crowded media warzone.

Studios are underestimating the sizable fanbases for older one-off films and/or legacy TV series. Chatter surrounding a potential LOST continuation has soldiered on for years without any tangible movement, while false rumours lit Film Twitter ablaze in 2020, suggesting Tenet was set in the world of Inception. Why is that? 

There are roughly 42 million U.S. consumers aged 35-plus who are nostalgic moviegoers of older titles and are likely to attend opening weekend, per Greenlight. Older millennials and younger Gen Xers are premium demographics with disposable income. But they’re mostly targeted via family entertainment that studios hope they’ll take their children to. Yes, adult-skewing dramas have become volatile box office bets. But that’s partly because Hollywood is aiming in the wrong direction. 

Hollywood has eaten itself alive spending the last 15 years squeezing every last drop out of notable franchises. Meanwhile, social platforms such as TikTok and YouTube have served as crucial discovery and reactivation tools for concepts that haven’t been over-exposed. There are nearly 114 million adult sci-fi moviegoers in the U.S., and many of them are heavy users of YouTube, per Greenlight, where fan culture is organically sustaining demand and engagement for titles like Interstellar. A viral TikTok/YouTube video, a news hook, a celebrity mention, a platform push—all of these elements can drive renewed surges.

Streaming data tells what audiences want

As the market-leader, Netflix is the default streamer. Its viewership serves as an important behavioral signal and not just empty nostalgia. Licensed titles are constantly rotating on and off the platform at varying intervals due to differing contractual agreements, but the streamer’s bi-annual engagement reports speak volumes about viewer appetites. 

Between 2023 and 2025, the first three seasons of LOST accumulated nearly 800 million global viewership hours (hat tip to What’s on Netflix). Interstellar (101 million hours) and The Truman Show (31 million hours) showed strong completion rates (total hours viewed divided by total runtime). That speaks to how immersive these stories remain years later.

Every Netflix view becomes a potential fan for a future installment. Around 65 percent of people rarely (or never) watch a sequel without seeing the original, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. Streaming is quietly building legions of new fans for dormant IP while owners collect lucrative licensing revenue. It’s a win-win. 

Troy’s demand peaked at 58 percent above its own already-elevated average in the past year, followed by The Truman Show (46 percent), per Parrot. Other prime candidates for dormant IP continuation include Scrubs and Malcolm in the Middle (both of which have received revivals), as well as Scarface (a film reboot in the works) and V for Vendetta (an HBO adaptation in development).

These types of titles are waiting to re-explode when re-activated by the right digital switch. Hollywood has more than enough IP to choose from, but lacks the compass to navigate it effectively. Studios chasing the sixth sequel of a tired series are fighting over shrinking slices of diminishing returns. The people who want a mix of classic and new, the audiences who only watch sequels to films they’ve seen, and the 800 million global hours of viewership dedicated to LOST seem to tell a consistent story.

At its best, the Academy Awards function as a time capsule for the year’s national (and increasingly international) consciousness. Long before hashtags, nominated films reflected what was “trending” on our minds. Platoon (1986) and The Hurt Locker (2009) revealed the harsh realities and cultural considerations of very different wars. Wall Street (1987) and The Big Short (2015) explored two sides of the same greed-driven coin. When art and technology intersected alongside this cultural mirror, the Oscars became a microcosm for larger behavioral shifts. The ceremony expanded to not only externalize our collective cares, but make a direct comment on where our attention is heading. 

Irony is not without a sense of humor. The Oscars, America’s most-watched awards show celebrating cinematic big screen storytelling, is heading to YouTube in 2029, a digital destination most commonly accessed on ever-shrinking screens for a couple of minutes at a time. Once a pillar of the monoculture that unified Hollywood and its consumer constituents, the awards show is losing gravitational pull to never-ending new niches. 

For the first time, the Oscars are chasing the audience rather than leading it. 

Finite attention in the Entertainment Everywhere era

You need no reminder that the Academy Awards have been bleeding viewers so profusely that it should be eligible for its own Makeup nomination. The ceremony has failed to crack 20 million viewers from 2021 to 2025 after decades of easily clearing that mark. Its decline speaks to how viewers consume media these days. We now exist in the Entertainment Everywhere era. 

U.S. audiences spent 16.7 trillion minutes streaming in 2025, per Nielsen. Instagram developed a TV screen app. Podcasts are now on Netflix. You can watch a creator play video games on YouTube or Twitch while playing the same game on your phone. You can build whole worlds in Minecraft and Roblox! Awards shows aren’t just competing with their same-night TV schedules. They compete with entire digital ecosystems. 

The 1980s and 90s often saw around 50 million Americans watch the Academy Awards coronate cultural sensations, experienced together en masse. Today, our cultural inputs are determined by personalized recommendation algorithms.

Mainstream box office hits struggle to consistently score nominations, while lauded smaller prestige films aren’t always sexy or sticky with audiences. Four of this year’s 10 Best Picture nominees (Bugonia, Hamnet, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent) failed to earn more than $50 million worldwide. Two nominees (Frankenstein, Train Dreams) are Netflix exclusive titles, which historically see sharp declines in engagement. This has more or less become par the course as we progress through the 21st century of film. 

I love arthouse movies as much as the next cinephile. But awards recognition no longer galvanizes the masses. So if your Best Picture slate is filled with more Maestros and Fabelmans than Top Gun: Mavericks and Barbies, you’re not going to capture as much attention. 

Social media has dismantled Hollywood mystique

Audiences used to only interact with celebrities through filtered traditional channels: magazine cover stories, the E! Channel, and dial-up internet (cut to Gen Z’s collective shudder). But celebrity today has gone direct-to-consumer. Social media builds unimpeded bridges to and from fanbases. 

This has demystified celebrity in ways that have likely contributed to the Oscars’ decline in cultural relevance. As experienced on live linear TV, the awards show once offered rare access to Hollywood’s biggest stars adorned in the finest (and most flawed) fashion. But celebrity’s novelty has been eroded now that fans have 24/7 access to their favorite figures. Why watch an hour of the red carpet to catch a single glimpse of Zendaya’s dress when she promotes her own fashion to more than 176 million Instagram followers? Hollywood’s longstanding fenced gateway has been punctured from the inside. 

Young social media-driven moviegoers, an audience of nearly 6.7 million adult Americans, are more than twice as likely as the average person to be influenced by online creators and over-index on multiple streaming platforms, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. But the pop culture conversation increasingly takes place on Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Letterboxd and memes across all of the above. The overall live audience is smaller, and the virality is less centralized. The origin of influence has shifted from the big screen to the phone screen. 

The goal of the YouTube migration is clear. The Academy wants to reach and recruit younger viewers, be more accessible to international audiences, and align with modern viewing behavior. But there exist logistical challenges. 

YouTube’s reported nine-figure commitment bested Disney’s eight-figure offer for Oscars rights, but the platform lacks experience producing live events in-house. Streaming struggles to match the broad reach of broadcast. YouTube’s exclusive NFL game in September drew 17.3 million viewers globally, less than the 18.7 million viewers the NFL averaged per game last season across linear TV and streaming platforms. Swapping out distribution platforms is no guarantee of an immediate audience increase.

The Oscars’ popularity has fallen in lockstep with landslide changes reshaping the audience and industry. Streaming and social media fragmentation, the loss of the monoculture, greater celebrity visibility and access, and changing tastes have all changed the game. The cultural shifts depicted in Best Picture contenders now stand in the shadow of what the waning ceremony says about culture at large. 

Escaping traditional distribution for a more modern alternative makes a certain amount of long-term sense. But it’s also a concession. The Oscars no longer set the cultural agenda. The best the nearly 100-year-old Academy Awards can hope for today is to try and keep up. 

AT&T paid $85.4 billion for Warner Bros. and failed to create value. The Walt Disney Company paid $71.3 billion for 20th Century Fox, and analysts still debate whether it was the right move. Discovery forked over $43 billion for Warner Bros. and is now selling. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is now committing $111 billion for the same asset. Yes, there has often been sound business logic behind major media mergers in recent years. But they consistently disappoint because properly integrating all those moving parts—creative, financial, cultural, etc.—is really damn hard, time-consuming and expensive.

“Large media mergers rarely disappoint because the strategy lacks logic. They disappoint because asset scale is easier to combine than operating models,” M&A integration expert and NYU instructor Klint Kendrick told Observer.

WarnerMount, ParaBros, or HBO-CBS (whatever they end up calling themselves) now has a war chest of blockbuster franchise IP, a roster of recognizable and popular network brands, a hefty collection of news and sports, a nine-figure streaming subscriber count, a ton of production space and global distribution infrastructure, and a backdoor into TikTok’s algorithm—thanks to the acquisition of the social app’s U.S. operations spearheaded by David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison. It’s also the company with the greatest exposure to declining linear assets, a harsh debt load, a whole host of redundancies, conflicting KPIs and hierarchical Jenga dynamics. 

Can it work? Absolutely. Will it work? It depends entirely on execution.

The question of finding a new identity

Beyond the cavernous combined libraries, WBD delivers roughly 80 shows per year across in-house and third-party platforms, while Paramount Skydance delivers around 120. While those numbers may come down as a singular company, the new entity will be the most powerful content arms dealer on the market. 

The mountain of debt from the transaction ($79 billion) will necessitate an ocean of licensing revenue. But that scale gives the company immense leverage at the negotiating table. It may be able to rewrite the rules of engagement in TV free agency with higher license fees, shorter lending windows, and smaller incremental payouts.

“If Paramount spins cable assets, repositions them, or leans into scaled third-party studio supply, the financial logic may hold,” Kendrick said. “The execution question is whether leadership rapidly resets decision rights and aligns incentives around IP profitability rather than legacy linear benchmarks.” 

Paramount is sitting pretty from a content-volume standpoint. But how do Warner Bros.’ fantastical franchises blend with Paramount’s slightly more earthbound blockbusters? Does HBO’s elevated prestige mesh alongside CBS’ engineered accessibility? Can Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, CNN and CBS News realistically co-exist under the same roof? 

“Paramount’s biggest problem isn’t their content. It’s their identity,” Tracy Lamourie, media strategist and founder of Lamourie Media, told Observer.

On the theatrical side, the combination offers headache-reducing stability but doesn’t necessarily yield a huge ceiling increase on paper, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. 

Evaluating which brand assets to emphasize and which to reduce will be a painfully necessary process. Along the way, developing a true brand identity will be crucial. What defines a ParaBros film? Coherence is needed for dealmaking behind closed doors and audience perception. What should subscribers expect from and associate with an HBO Max-Paramount+ original streaming series? What are you known for?

Between Washington and Silicon Valley

For months, the entire media industry has banged the drum about the Ellison family’s close ties to the Trump administration. Yes, that should, in theory, grease the wheels of this merger. But are we sure there aren’t any U.S. regulators who might consider the consolidation of CNN and CBS news, a dominant 35 to 40 percent cable TV market share under one umbrella, and Middle East money backing this deal to be worth a second look? What about European regulators who may be itching to throw a wrench into American media plans? Either way, expectations are that the deal won’t close for anywhere between six to 18 months. 

Paramount now has a stockpile of scaled assets. But its ravenous spending must be followed by strategic discipline and brand clarity. The risk is collapsing under the weight of all that ownership. Anything short of surgical precision in execution threatens to derail what could be a transformative new era. 

In one way or another, trillion-dollar companies Apple ($3.78 trillion), Google ($3.63 trillion), Amazon ($2.32 trillion) and Meta ($1.64 trillion) have all entered the content game in the 21st century. This has left legacy media companies such as Paramount Skydance ($13.4 billion), Warner Bros. Discovery ($69 billion) and even the Walt Disney empire ($178.6 billion) at a distinct disadvantage, especially when it comes to pouncing on attractive assets. 

Google snatched up YouTube (and, more recently, NFL Sunday Ticket), Amazon could easily afford to overpay for MGM (and Thursday Night Football), and Netflix almost snagged WBD. Wall Street has never put as much pressure on tech stocks to deliver immediate profits, allowing their entertainment divisions to operate at a loss for extended periods. Legacy media does not receive the same gentle treatment. 

Driven by the endless pockets of Big Tech, going it alone has become more financially fraught than ever before. But this era of consolidation will not be won simply by acquiring the shiniest toys available. Instead, those who know exactly what they’re selling and how to endure a war of attrition are best positioned for the future. 

We stumble forward in a daze with the slow realization dawning over us amidst an indescribable fatigue. Our body uncurls itself from tension’s chokehold as the never-ending burden finally lifts. “It’s done,” we whisper. Okay, you caught me. I’m describing the climax of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King when Frodo and Samwise finally rid Middle Earth of that pesky little trinket. But you have to admit, it completely applies to our exhaustive gratefulness that the Warner Bros. Discovery sweepstakes are finally over. Netflix bowed out of the race, leaving Paramount Skydance to gobble up the historic legacy studio (regulatory approval notwithstanding). 

While Netflix lost an industry-defining asset, it gets to walk away with a $2.8 billion breakup fee and, to the delight of its shareholders, returns to its core business of streaming. But now that this massive deal is off the table, the company has lingering questions about its future identity and execution.

“Netflix doesn’t need to win the scale war. They’ve already won the scale war. Now they have to win the durability war,” Tracy Lamourie, media strategist and founder of Lamourie Media, told Observer.

Traditional Hollywood has long been envious of Netflix because Wall Street treats the content company as a tech stock. However, Netflix’s share price tumbled roughly 35 percent after the December news that it had “won” the WBD arms race, before recovering after Paramount’s 12th round TKO. Investors did not respond well to the market-leading streamer operating like a legacy media company.

Shareholders seem to want financial discipline and global scale rather than the integration complexities of such a major transaction. Now, Netflix has an extra $2.8 billion to play with. This is more than the company’s average free cash flow of $2.2 billion over the last five quarters. Essentially, the breakup fee nets Netflix an additional quarter of generous business virtually out of thin air. “The breakup fee is not transformational capital, it’s optionality,” Lamourie said. 

The million-dollar sports question

Netflix has flirted with live events but has only found success with a very select few (Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson, NFL Christmas games, etc.). Sports rights are very expensive. So the cost-benefit equation comes down to whether or not they are among the last true growth drivers or a needless loss leader for Netflix. 

“Live sports is the only content category that cannot be time-shifted, pirated or faked by an inferior competitor at a lower price,” YouTube strategist Mike Dee told Observer. Very true. But do they fit on Netflix, which has built an empire largely without them? “Sports is an interesting growth area,” film production expert Matthew Celia mused. “The question is whether it fits Netflix’s DNA long-term or just answers a short-term pressure.”

Netflix already boasts 325 million-plus global subscribers, the company disclosed at the end of 2025. It’s fair to wonder whether it needs more raw size. As of now, the company seems content to experiment with peripheral engagement drivers such as podcasts, YouTube creator recruitment, and vertical video. (Co-CEO Greg Peters even hinted that Netflix might be rerouting some of that breakup fee to podcasts and video games, though the latter has proved largely immaterial since launching in 2021).

“The real risk is cultural saturation.”

Netflix’s subscriber growth has slowed, hence why it stopped reporting quarterly numbers. Its U.S. share of TV time is relatively flat over the last three years, per Nielsen. Yet it still maintains the industry’s lowest churn rate (around 2 percent monthly) by a wide margin, according to Antenna data.

“The risk isn’t subscriber churn; the risk is cultural saturation,” Lamourie warned.

Netflix is the largest streamer and most prolific movie studio on the planet. In its all-consuming quest for broad buffet appeal, its global daily engagement per viewer declined from 2023 to 2025. Fair or not, the streamer must battle consumer perceptions of quick cancellations, formulaic slates, and fewer culturally defining breakthrough moments. 

Wall Street is rewarding its careful consideration of cash flow. But the financial discipline of not getting into a bidding war with Paramount must eventually be matched by reinvention. Netflix already possesses scale. Facing a future without WBD requires a new growth path that doesn’t distill or sanitize its creative quality and cultural footprint.

Here’s a blinding glimpse of the obvious: streaming audiences love sports! But the cost of sports rights has grown to untenable proportions. The amount of sports content across the five global streamers (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Paramount+, Disney+) has grown by 52 percent since January 2024, according to Nielsen. Across the industry, streamers will spend a bottom-line-busting $14.2 billion on sports in 2026, per Ampere Analysis. The NFL’s looming renegotiations will be so expensive that legacy media executives are already talking about “rebalancing” their portfolios (i.e., cutting spending elsewhere) to afford it. 

As the streaming industry matures, these platforms desperately want to shift sports rights from loss leaders to money-makers. Raising subscription prices is a temporary band-aid. Long-term, streamers need to build content libraries that maximize retention well into the off-season to have any hope of recouping their investments. This brings us to an obvious yet complicated question: who are sports fans and what else do they like to watch? 

Given increased competition, price sensitivity and overall saturation, premium streamers are finding it harder to attract new subscribers in recent years. Despite this, sports remain a consistent draw for fresh sign-ups, similar to how Thin Mints are guaranteed to get my money when the Girl Scouts come knocking. 

The start of each NFL season continues to be kind for subscriber numbers at Paramount+ and Peacock. The recent migration of UFC to the former has also helped. Netflix’s mix of Christmas NFL games, weekly WWE programming and high-profile boxing matches is bringing new eyeballs on board. Apple TV has benefited more moderately from its collection of Friday Night Baseball, F1 and MLS rights. 

Netflix’s prize fight between Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford in September brought in 238,000 new subscribers, accounting for 15 percent of new sign-ups that month, per Antenna. Three of the top 10 Netflix titles in sign-ups that month were WWE events. Sports are so immensely valuable because they serve as the most effective on-ramp for new customers entering new streamers. 

Who are sports fans, and what else do they watch?

There are more than 145 million U.S. adult sports fans spanning nearly 90 million households, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights and Content Strategy. Within that large bucket, 68 percent of fans are male, while 32 percent are female. They still over-index with older audiences: Age 65+ (28 percent), 55-64 (17 percent), 45-54 (17 percent) are the three largest contingents. This suggests that the broad reach of broadcast TV still matters even as sports fans engage with streaming platforms. 

Sports fans are multi-streamers and are heavy users of digital media. They are 12 percent more likely than an average American adult to be Hulu subscribers, followed by Amazon (9 percent), YouTube (7 percent), Peacock (2 percent) and Paramount+ (2 percent). They also like podcasts, live TV, cable and streaming in general. But platforms need to keep these audiences on the paying hook well after their favorite teams or athletes are done playing.

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are leading by this measure. Seven of the top 10 titles viewers watched right after Canelo vs. Crawford were on Netflix, per Antenna. The other three were Thursday Night Football games on Amazon Prime. Among the non-sports options, the most popular co-viewed title was Happy Gilmore 2, as 20 percent of the fight’s audience also tuned into the Adam Sandler comedy. It was followed by Untamed (17 percent), Wednesday (16 percent), Madea’s Destination Wedding (11 percent), The Old Guard 2 (11 percent), KPop Demon Hunters (11 percent), and Squid Game (10 percent). 

Data from Streamline, which helps users find where and when to watch sports, film and TV, tells a similar story. The 10 narrative titles most added to the watchlists of sports fans over the last month include: Landman, The Pitt, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, His & Hers, The Rookie, Stranger Things, Shrinking, 1923, Paradise and Pluribus. (A friend of mine binged Season 5 of Hulu’s hockey comedy Shoresy after watching the U.S. Men’s Hockey team win Olympic gold!). 

Sports fans love other sports. That’s an obvious but costly programming strategy. Amazon is paying nearly $3 billion a year for the NFL and NBA alone, while Paramount pays more than $3 billion for the NFL and UFC. Elsewhere, mainstream genre-spanning hits (crime/thriller dramas, medical procedural, horror-comedy, sci-fi and fantasy, animation, dramedy) and broad-appeal movies scratch their itch. 

How streamers retain sports fans beyond game day

The years-long hype surrounding the sports docu-series genre does not match the viewership reality. But sports-doc viewer affinity can still help us understand the directional tastes of sports fans. Whip Media’s TV Time shows the user overlap of expressed viewership intent between titles—users who said they plan to watch title X also said they plan to watch title Y. 

For Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance, top overlaps by affinity include Quarterback, Untold, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Hard Knocks, and Mr. McMahon.  Sports docs, behind-the-scenes series, sports-adjacent tell-alls and scripted dramatizations all belong to similar taste clusters. For Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the trend expands into Senna, The Grand Tour, Masters of the Air, Our Planet, and Tiger King, reflecting broader automotive fandom and premium scripted spectacle. Meanwhile, ESPN’s 30 for 30 pushes more into comedy and buzzy non-scripted programming like Tiger King, Veep, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Mythic Quest and the sports-centric Ballers. 

What did we learn? Sports fans respond to a mix of related scripted fare, relevant flashy originals and lean-back catalog programming. 

As more sports migrate to streaming, platforms should focus on building a chain of live sports programming; a sports-plus library that nudges viewers into adjacent content related to their favorite players, teams and leagues; and leverage mainstream scripted programming as bridges between major events. Come for UFC and Canelo vs. Crawford; stay for Wednesday and Landman. 

Sports remain the best acquisition drivers in these leaner sign-up times. But housing multiple sports in a single digital ecosystem is not the only final answer. Sports fans have predictable and programmable tastes and media habits. Grand-scheme ROI depends on designing the perfect post-game library funnel.

“What now?” It’s the first question that crops up between cause and effect. It’s the exact question Disney employees are asking from behind the hallowed walls of the Magic Kingdom. It’s the gaping unknown gnawing at the certainty-seeking minds of Hollywood observers. In a digital world, Disney’s dividends are driven by the steel and wood of its roller coasters. 

Bob Iger will hand the reins of The Walt Disney Company to Parks & Experiences head Josh D’Amaro next month. This we saw coming. In 2023, Disney announced a $60 billion investment into Parks & Experiences over 10 years. D’Amaro’s division recently topped $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time and accounts for 60 percent of Disney’s profit.

Content may no longer be the great equalizer in today’s fragmented media landscape. But content still drives Disney’s famous flywheel. Consumers love going to the parks because it is an extension of their favorite characters: Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, Avatar Flight of Passage, etc. That’s why co-chairman of Disney Entertainment and TV head honcho Dana Walden’s elevation to Disney’s first president and chief creative officer is the real intrigue.  

Walden’s promotion falls directly in line with the rest of Hollywood’s recent anointment of veteran television executives to oversee all content. At a time when Kathleen Kennedy is vacating the top spot at Lucasfilm, Kevin Feige doesn’t feel quite as invincible as he once did, Pixar is attempting to get its groove back, and Walden will now be above Disney Studios Content Chairman and film unit maestro Alan Bergman, Disney’s future is as malleable as it has ever been in the 21st century. 

Film is the foundational launching pad for multimedia franchises bred to be milked for every last drop. Disney is responsible for four of the 10 highest-ranking films on Greenlight Analytics’ “Theatrical Intent” list over the last five years. It may be an unfamiliar stage for Walden. But she knows storytelling, and streaming is the needle mover with more long-term economic upside, even if it will never be considered grand and prestigious. 

Here is where the “what now?” question begins to sprout tendrils. Disney’s future won’t depend solely on who makes the opening remarks on quarterly earnings calls. Instead, its prospects will rise and fall with the types of stories it chooses to tell and how it builds value from them beyond the screen. 

Warner Bros. Discovery tried and failed to be a one-stop shop for Netflix competitors. Now here’s Disney—the cleanest and most easily understood brand in Hollywood history—struggling with general entertainment after investing tens of billions into it. Walden’s content track record across her Fox and Disney tenures is wildly enviable. 24, Modern Family, American Horror Story, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, 9-1-1, This Is Us, Only Murders in the Building, Paradise, The Bear, etc. These hits sell ad time and chew up engagement. But, as many have already pointed out, they don’t inspire theme park rides and merchandise sales (though now I can’t stop imagining a Carmy Berzatto attraction where park guests share cigarettes and panic attacks in a dirty kitchen). Hulu is great at surfacing long-running sitcoms and procedurals from broadcast television, but hasn’t yet mastered making its own versions at scale. Its absorption into Disney+ speaks volumes about its scalable strategic value. 

Disney is in a difficult position as a franchise-forward media company that has arguably invested too much in non-core generalist fare to turn back now. Fox, Hulu and sports have been essential loss leaders, debt-ridden albatrosses, or something in the middle, depending on who you ask. 

If D’Amaro revisits Iger 2.0’s early Sun Valley comments entertaining the idea of selling off brands that don’t brighten Disney’s halo effect, where does that leave Disney’s content engines? The same question is just as compelling if he doesn’t. As sports media rights trampoline into even more expensive territory, scripted content will continue to lose airtime. 

That speaks to an ongoing streaming dilemma. Can Walden juice time spent on Disney’s streaming platforms, which have remained flat for roughly two years? Back in the heyday of cable, the Disney Channel would deliver a handful of modestly budgeted hit original movies each year that became reliable assets. Why and how this model has been abandoned in favor of much more expensive streaming exclusive films is a mystery to me. (Though the Descendants and Zombies movies seem to be doing well).  

Disney announced a $1.5 billion investment in Fortnite maker Epic Games back in 2024, though no substantial film/TV projects have come from it. D’Amaro oversees video games, and Walden has the creative chops to spin something new out of something old. Video games have replaced superheroes as Hollywood’s shiny new funnel of blockbuster IP, necessitating a bold step into this arena sooner rather than later. 

Paramount has Sonic (and soon Call of Duty), Warner Bros. has A Minecraft Movie and The Last of Us, Universal has a fledgling Nintendo universe, Sony has Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil movie, and Netflix has been dabbling in video game properties for a while. Despite rampant rumors over the years, a Kingdom Hearts video game adaptation has never reached Disney’s screens. That game already boasts a successful roadmap, built-in fan base, and irresistible wish fulfillment. It’s the type of splashy, Disney universe-reinforcing project that splits the difference between modernity and recycling. Not for nothing, it’s also a worthy attempt at stretching beyond superheroes. (The same thinking goes for anime, albeit with lower floors and ceilings for now.)  

We know it’s always more valuable to fully own IP in-house. But it’s not always realistic. Disney+’s hit Bluey is licensed (with a film adaptation in the works), and Disney recently acquired the Impossible Creatures book series. Continuing to eye the market for strategically aligned opportunities to add new toys to the sandbox is a likely (and needed) path. It sets a new tone for a new era. 

And this wouldn’t be Disney without returning to the well of success at least once. Encanto is the most popular streaming movie ever in the U.S., according to Nielsen data. Its muted box office was the result of a COVID-depressed theatrical marketplace, not an indictment on its quality. The overall audience response has made that clear. 

Greenlighting a sequel wouldn’t just be a brand-safe, house-style move. It would be a signal flare that Walden and her team understand the value of original storytelling, discovery and franchise expansion. For a company stuck in a tug-of-war with the past, Encanto sits at the intersection of fully owned in-house IP, streaming-era audience reach, multimedia franchise potential and risk vs safety. 

Disney’s next era is already underway. What will result depends on its ability to move beyond its standard way of doing things in order to cultivate new and existing stories while recognizing when—and how—they actually hit.

The 2010s marked the streaming industry’s adolescence. Coupling a creative unshackling with the thrill of unbridled newness left those in the media bubble positively cooing like first-time parents. That would make the streaming boom of 2019-2022 its experimental college years. All that youthful optimism funneled into an unprecedented expansion. Yet since then, streaming has eventfully entered the “real world.” The industry is now a young adult assimilating into the steady nine-to-five routine. Growth is no longer driven by splashy hype. Instead, it is the reliability of habit that wins the day. And the data seems to back that up.

Nielsen recently released its annual top streaming performance lists, meaning we now have yearly leaders from 2020 to 2025. Last year saw a 19 percent uptick in total U.S. streaming minutes compared to 2024. Yet, while streaming time is up, the variety of hits isn’t exactly following suit. Top 10 lists across original streaming series, acquired (licensed) series, and movies remain dominated by the same intellectual properties making multiple appearances. 

The overall performances speak loudly to what audiences want in the streaming age and which companies are giving it to them.

Why the same shows keep winning

Just as the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Lakers always seem to be in the playoffs, sitcoms, procedurals and animated kids’ fare consistently rank among the best-performing titles year in and year out. Bluey (1st), Grey’s Anatomy (2nd), NCIS (4th), SpongeBob SquarePants (5th), The Big Bang Theory (8th) and Criminal Minds (10th) were not only among the 10 most-streamed shows overall in 2025, but have made multiple appearances across top “Acquired” and “Overall” TV lists in the last half decade. (No wonder there’s a Bluey movie en route). Just one streaming original series (Stranger Things, 2nd) managed to claw its way onto the overall Top 10. 

Most of these shows, and the majority of the “Acquired” TV lists, consist of libraries with hundreds of episodes. (Nielsen’s minutes-viewed metric rewards longer-running series with many episodes). Yes, new action and thrillers thrive on the small screen. But audiences do gravitate toward laundry-folding comfort shows a bit more than cultural daggers. Returning hits capture the largest share of attention, while new hits are more on the periphery of the highest levels. 

If your main character is a cop, doctor or cartoon, you just might have an edge. 

Netflix leads in existing and new originals

Netflix laid claim to seven of the Top 10 most-streamed originals in 2025 (though 10th place airs on both Netflix and Amazon): Stranger Things (1st), Squid Game (2nd), Wednesday (3rd), Ginny & Georgia (6th), The Night Agent (8th), Love Is Blind (9th), Gabby’s Dollhouse (10th). All of those shows have made multiple appearances in the yearly top 10s. 

Even amid the regurgitation of familiarity, Netflix has managed to effectively launch new hits. First seasons (and/or one-season limited series) of Tiger King, Squid Game, Bridgerton, Maid, Wednesday, Dahmer, Inventing Anna, The Night Agent and Fool Me Once all made a Top 10 annual streaming original list in recent years.

Launching new shows proved more difficult last year, and all streamers struggle with original comedy. But even with the issues, Netflix was still responsible for the second most-watched new original drama (The Residence, which was admittedly cancelled), the two most-watched new comedies (Running Point and The Four Seasons) and the two most-watched new unscripted series (Sean Combs: The Reckoning and Million Dollar Secret). (Paramount+’s Landman and Peacock’s Love Island USA are the only Top 10 streaming originals making their first appearances this year). 

Netflix is far less dominant in the “Acquired” and “Overall” lists. Its scale typically enables it to debut new shows fairly successfully, but sustaining them for the long term is trickier today. 

Prestige doesn’t translate to the top 10 scale

Premium programming may be my bag, but the rest of the country apparently doesn’t agree. 

Nielsen began tracking HBO Max in April 2022. Since then, not a single HBO title has made a top annual “Acquired Series” list. Granted, this is a post-Game of Thrones world, and making the “Acquired” list is far more competitive than the others. But still—surprising! HBO Max original The Pitt was the most-watched new original streaming drama in 2025. Appointment viewing furnishes a quality brand and drives regular weekly tune-in. But it’s a different model from the endless drawl of sitcoms and procedurals. It doesn’t automatically boast the same library value. 

Then there’s the lack of Warner Bros. film representation. Due to the dominant rewatchability of kids’ films, Nielsen broke out a separate 2025 “General Audience Movie” list for the first time (Seven out of ten films were released between 2024-25). Despite WB’s stellar box office year, the studio’s only films among the Top 10 were the first two Harry Potter films, which were non-exclusive with Peacock. The data shows that fantasy is actually a high-upside genre across both film and TV if made accessible and not bogged down in intricate mythology.

On the flip side of this equation, Amazon Prime Video reaches an impressive 54 percent of U.S. households, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. The streamer has delivered select breakout shows such as The Boys, Reacher, Fallout, and Red One. But its quiet overall presence suggests viewers enjoy the service but have not yet added it to their regular entertainment routines. 

Kids’ entertainment is beyond dominant

As the brilliant kids media analyst Emily Horgan often notes, children’s entertainment remains undervalued relative to its practical contributions. “While many think of the streaming wars as a battle for the buzziest new awards drama or star-studded blockbuster, the real SVOD clashes are fought in the trenches of regular daily usage,” Horgan wrote. “That’s where animated kids’ movies truly shine.”

Bluey has been the top overall title in back-to-back years, while Cocomelon was a mainstay on the charts in the early 2020s. Family-friendly movies and legacy IP have proven to be the algorithm-proof gift that keeps on giving. 

Disney has firmly established squatter’s rights in this lane. Of the 70 top annual film slots from 2020-2025 (including Nielsen’s new bifurcated movie lists this year), 34 belong to Disney+. The company manages to land the same films—Moana, Zootopia, Frozen I and II and Encanto—onto multiple lists as does Universal’s Dreamworks and Illumination across Peacock and Netflix to a lesser extent.

Consistent box office returns plus guaranteed streaming viewership anoint kids’ entertainment as the king of all genres today. 

Headlines for Hollywood

It’s important to remember that just because a given title doesn’t appear among the 10 most-streamed shows every year doesn’t mean it’s unsuccessful. There are plenty of hits to be found beyond this narrow snapshot. 

Prestige, novelty and event programming are helpful brand builders with temporary pop. But familiar recyclability and consistency appear to yield the best results. Comfort viewing and long runways for early breakout hits serve as streaming’s foundation and pillars, respectively, while “new” events struggle with sustainability. In that way, the upper echelons of streaming viewership confirm the industry’s shift into more mundane, expected territory. Welcome to the workforce. 

From Marvel to DC and Middle Earth to the Wizarding World, Hollywood has spent much of this past quarter-century serving up franchise universes as the signature theatrical offering. This stood in stark contrast to the 1970s, when singular filmmakers pushed cinema to industry-altering new critical and commercial heights. Though star power today, both in front of and behind the camera, has lost the luster of yesteryear, there still exists a small handful of filmmakers who boast drawing power all their own. 

These storytellers have proven the rare ability to open original and/or atypical films to box office success and launch or sustain new franchises. They also consistently generate early audience excitement based on their name power while attracting highly valuable audiences to theaters. 

Intellectual property can augment the final outcome, but it is these directors who secure green lights from studios and buy-in from audiences early. As a result, they very much earn the blank checks Hollywood is eager to offer them.

Christopher Nolan

If you predicted that Oppenheimer would outgross Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk, you either boast Jean Grey-level fortune-telling ability or a remarkable penchant for lying. 

Eleven months before the Oscar-winner’s release, “Interest” among audiences aware of the upcoming film stood at a whopping 67 percent, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. “Theatrical Intent,” or those who said they planned to see the film in theaters, was at 46 percent. 

Every film exists on a sliding scale. But if “Interest” and “Theatrical Intent” sit above 50 percent and “Interest Among Aware” is north of 65 percent upon release, you’re likely in decent shape. Oppenheimer nearly cleared those bars as soon as the first trailer dropped. We’re seeing this play out yet again for The Odyssey, which also sported an Interest Among Aware score of 67 percent a year before its release. 

Nolan has proven to be a consistent draw for original and new-to-screen concepts, particularly for audiences 35 and over. This highlights his ability to bring casual and/or infrequent moviegoers to theaters, which fuel breakout performances. 

Ryan Coogler

Coogler is doing incredible work both within and beyond the confines of franchise filmmaking. Wakanda Forever’s “Theatrical Intent” score grew from 50 to 60 percent from its first trailer through release. (Unsurprisingly, successful films tend to grow their scores throughout the marketing campaign leading into release). But it was Sinners that proved the young storyteller is a standalone brand. 

Seven months before release, the original vampire tale scored 65 percent in “Interest Among Aware.” Even more impressive is how the culturally rich and resonant film scored elite results with Black audiences upon release across “Awareness” (66 percent), “Interest” (66 percent), “Theatrical Intent” (59 percent) and “Willingness to Pay” (68 percent)—theatrical ticket, VOD transaction or streaming subscription. 

Coogler isn’t just delivering highly successful films at the box office. He is activating highly valuable demographics early and often. Like Nolan, viewers have come to associate him with big-screen quality. 

James Cameron

Twelve months before release, Avatar: The Way of Water scored huge in “Interest” (60 percent), “Interest Among Aware” (77 percent) and “Theatrical Intent” (48 percent). Though not quite as explosive, Fire and Ash cleared high benchmarks across all three metrics at similar pre-release points. Both films ranked in the top three in audience preference for premium large-format screens among 40-plus films in their respective release years. New or old, he creates and sustains franchises that consistently defy expectations—which he’s done across decades! 

James Cameron is synonymous with theatrical scope and scale. His films demand to be experienced in the best and biggest formats possible. Audiences are happy to oblige even if it costs them a few extra dollars. 

Greta Gerwig

Barbie was the very definition of atypical IP. Gerwig managed to craft a compelling narrative around a toy with no discernible story to tell. She also directly appealed to female moviegoers, something Hollywood struggles to do consistently. 

The same appears to be playing out for her upcoming Narnia adaptation for Netflix, which will exclusively play on 1,000 IMAX screens for a minimum of two weeks. Eleven months before release, the film was tracking well with general audiences in “Interest” (47 percent), “Theatrical Intent Among Aware” (56 percent), and “Theatrical Intent Among Interested” (65 percent). Unsurprisingly, it’s one of Netflix’s most highly anticipated 2026 films. 

Narnia’s scores with women under 35 are even better than its results with all moviegoers. Gerwig’s ability to activate young female moviegoers who consistently convert into ticketbuyers is virtually unrivaled right now. That translates to high floors and high ceilings at the box office. 

Jordan Peele

When NOPE first hit tracking seven months before release, it did so with a 75 percent score in Interest Among Aware. That would be a home run for any film in its week of release, let alone seven months in advance. Audiences that knew about the title early on were immediately keen on it. Cultivating that sort of buy-in despite the horror genre often deliberately keeping its marketing mysteriously opaque is a testament to the brand Peele has developed. 

Passionate early engagement, particularly compared to relatively modest early awareness, has become his calling card. I can’t think of a more apt summation of Peele’s power as a filmmaker. 

Who else is in the mix, and why does it matter?

These aren’t the only directors who sell tickets by themselves, though it remains increasingly rare. Quentin Tarantino qualifies, though he hasn’t delivered a new film since 2019. Steven Spielberg’s return to summer tentpoles this year with the alien film Disclosure Day will be revealing. Is the Spielberg brand still a top-tier selling point in the modern movie marketplace? It depends on whether the long-lead tracking falls in line with other filmmaker-driven patterns or more traditional trajectories.

As of right now, early indicators suggest the former. “Interest Among Aware” (79 percent), “Interest Among Unaware Audiences”—people who find the concept appealing even if they don’t know about the film—(67 percent) and “Theatrical Intent Among Aware” (68 percent) are strong. 

IP remains vitally important to a film’s commercial prospects. But in select cases, directors can be the appetizing scent that ignites the audience’s voracious appetite. Just as fans follow their favorite franchises installment to installment, these filmmakers elicit the same project-by-project attention. 

That can be worth billions of dollars in a challenging industry where every studio is desperate to de-risk big budgets and identify potential earlier in the moviemaking life cycle. It’s why Nolan is the rare filmmaker to receive a percentage of all box-office revenue, not just when the film becomes profitable. It’s why Warner Bros. agreed to transfer ownership of Sinners back to Coogler after 25 years. It’s why Cameron can do pretty much whatever he wants, Gerwig was able to negotiate for Netflix’s most emphatic theatrical experiment yet, and why Peele enjoys creative freedom. 

Every director wants to be their own franchise, and every studio wants them working on their lots.

The final season of Stranger Things is more than a television conclusion—it marks the end of Netflix’s first era of ascension. Since its debut in 2016 (when its cast of kids still looked like actual children), Stranger Things has been the most popular TV series behind only Game of Thrones. Its ability to drive subscription growth, generate addiction-level hours of viewing, and mint money cemented Netflix’s rise as a programming powerhouse. 

Streaming is a hits-driven business, and every major player needs a tentpole series to anchor its results. As Stranger Things closes, let’s pinpoint the most important actively running flagship TV series of the streaming era. Using a mix of viewership, revenue, longevity and franchise potential, here are the shows doing their best Atlas impressions by holding up their respective streamers. 

Netflix: Stranger Things

In 2022, Stranger Things was the most-watched U.S. streaming original at 52 billion (!) minutes (No.2 was Ozark at 31.2 billion minutes), according to Nielsen. Even after three years without new episodes, it ranked as the 17th most-watched streaming original (5.4 billion minutes) over the first half of 2025. The four-episode Season 5 premiere in November drew the largest first-week global audience for an English-language Netflix series—second all-time only to Squid Game Season 2’s debut. 

After nine years atop the pop-culture hierarchy, whispers of spinoffs, prequels and other expansions persist. Yet creators Ross and Matt Duffer are departing Netflix for a lucrative deal at Paramount, leaving Netflix without a clear heir apparent.

Squid Game actually generated the most estimated global revenue for Netflix ($180 million from Q4 2024 to Q3 2025, including subscriber retention and new subscriber acquisition, per Parrot Analytics). It was also the second most-watched streaming original in 2021 (16.4 billion minutes) at its debut and the ninth most-watched show overall across the first half of 2025 (15 billion minutes). But it’s finished now. 

Wednesday’s second season became Netflix’s fourth most-watched English series ever, but dropped 50 percent compared to Season 1. Since The Adams Family IP belongs to Amazon MGM, Netflix can’t capture its full value.

In the absence of Stranger Things, the market-leading streamer faces a void on its release calendar with no obvious fill.  

Amazon Prime Video: The Boys

Like Netflix, Amazon is nearing the end of a flagship run. The hyper-violent superhero satire The Boys will conclude after its upcoming fifth season, having ranked in the Top 15 streaming originals twice (in 2022 and 2024). The question is how much higher this superpowered IP can fly. 

Amazon is planning a 1950s-set prequel series (Vought Rising) and a Spanish-language series (The Boys: Mexico). But earlier spin-offs—animated anthology Diabolical (one season) and live-action companion Gen V (two seasons)—didn’t quite break out despite being well-liked. 

Fortunately for Amazon, Reacher has emerged as Amazon’s next heavyweight over its first three seasons. In 2024, it ranked 10th among Nielsen’s U.S. streaming originals (10.6 billion minutes) and climbed to fifth overall in 2025, per Samba TV’s State of Streaming report (releasing new seasons yearly helps maintain audience momentum). This has made it Prime Video’s biggest TV windfall over the last year, with an estimated $132 million in revenue contribution. A spinoff was ordered for the series in October. 

Disney+: The Mandalorian

The Mandalorian helped Disney+’s launch outperform all reasonable expectations in the platform’s first year of existence. Since 2020, it has landed twice among Nielsen’s ten most-watched series while becoming the linchpin of the streamer’s small-screen Star Wars universe. 

This May, the show will make the leap to the big screen with The Mandalorian & Grogu, Star Wars’ first big-screen outing since 2019’s disappointing The Rise of Skywalker. Translating TV fandom into theatre ticket sales is far from guaranteed, but brand power ensures a high floor. 

The bigger question: Does this movie spell the end of the series? If so, Disney+—which has struggled to create live-action hits beyond the aging Marvel and Star Wars titles—needs a new flagship. Andor ($138 million in estimated revenue over the last year) was a critical marvel, but wrapped up its two-season run without approaching the same viewership highs. 

That said, with Hulu now fully integrated into Disney+, future seasons of FX’s Shogun could emerge as the streamer’s next tentpole. 

HBO Max: The White Lotus

HBO titles make up just 14 percent of HBO Max’s library, yet drive more than 18 percent of its audience demand, per Parrot. The premium cable network is television’s flagship brand. Of course, it continues to deliver streaming value. The White Lotus, in all of its original esoteric glory, may now be the service’s top title. 

Samba TV named it 2025’s most-streamed U.S. show overall with the year’s fourth-largest two-week viewership debut. From January to June, the upstairs-downstairs dynamic of the murder mystery anthology was Nielsen’s 16th most-watched series on streaming (11.5 billion minutes) and generated an estimated $124 million for HBO Max over the past year, per Parrot.

Production on Season 4 is set to start in 2026 in France.

Apple TV: Severance and Ted Lasso

This one’s a toss-up. 

Ted Lasso transformed the early identity of née Apple TV+, evolving from a feel-good sitcom to a prestige dramedy. It ranked as the 12th most-watched show of 2021 (8.1 billion minutes) and the top overall original of 2023 (16.9 billion), per Nielsen, despite the streamer’s small subscriber base. But Season 3 closed the original chapter, and while a continuation is in development—with some returning cast, but a new on-screen soccer team—it’s unclear if Ted Lasso will remain a juggernaut after another long wait.

In its place, the heady thriller Severance became a prestige breakout in its second season. Over the first half of this year, it was the fifth most-watched streaming original (9.2 billion minutes), per Nielsen, and led all Apple TV shows in estimated revenue contribution ($146 million), per Parrot. Apple calls it its top series ever based on unique viewers in the first month of its sophomore run. Yet after a nearly three-year gap, another long wait looms before Season 3.

There’s a particularly trenchant quote from HBO’s House of the Dragon that keeps popping into my head as major media companies jockey for position in pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery: “Aegon Targaryen sits the Iron Throne. He wears the Conqueror’s crown, wields the Conqueror’s sword, has the Conqueror’s name. He was anointed by a septon of the Faith before the eyes of thousands. Every symbol of legitimacy belongs to him.” 

Symbols are assets that can be leveraged for value in different ways. Zooming out to House of the Dragon’s home network, HBO finds itself in a position to be an integral symbol of legitimacy and value in the WBD sweepstakes. As all publicly circle the wagons, it’s time to explore the premium cable network’s merits and which company would benefit most from its addition.

This article contains a plethora of data points that highlight whitespace opportunities and strategic value in the market. But it’s not always the quantifiable elements that yield the greatest benefits. HBO’s multi-decade track record as a culture-shaping authority cannot be summed up in an Excel sheet.  

“It is not merely a content library; rather, it is a brand that stands for prestige and audience trust, meaning an acquirer instantly uplevels its brand value with the acquisition, as well as attracts unrivaled talent,” Andrew Cussens, CEO of content studio Film Folk, told Observer.

This very notion was recently demonstrated when WBD re-rebranded its streaming service to HBO Max. The name carries weight throughout the industry while certain rival brands still search for a defined identity that elicits strong audience associations. The data backs up its position as a go-to destination and an illuminating opportunity.

HBO and HBO Max by the numbers

WBD’s streaming platforms had 128 million subscribers at the end of September, with the vast majority belonging to HBO Max. (Netflix has more than 300 million subscribers.) It’s a hits-driven platform that values prestige quality over quantity. That’s incredibly valuable, but it can run counter to mass market ambitions. 

For example, The Last of Us Season 2 and The White Lotus Season 3 rank among the most-watched U.S. streaming series of 2025, according to Samba TV’s State of Streaming report. Yet, HBO Max only accounts for 7 percent of the Top 100 most-streamed series overall, per Samba, while WBD’s share of U.S. streaming sits at just 1.3 percent, per Nielsen, respectively. Even as the majority of viewing for HBO series occurs on streaming vs linear, HBO Max remains a top-heavy platform that accounts for a surprisingly small slice of the U.S. TV pie despite its namesake brand’s prestige.

From Watchmen and Penguin to House of the Dragon and It: Welcome to Derry, HBO has worked wonders in elevating brand-name intellectual property and franchise fare in pursuit of greater viewership (while still succeeding with more standard “prestige” fare like The White Lotus and Task). This raises the question: has it reached its scalable ceiling? 

“There is definite upside in the number of subscribers and revenue-per-viewer, and HBO Max hasn’t saturated either,” Samba TV CEO and co-founder Ashwin Navin told Observer. “By adding new tier-one shows and tentpoles, they can continue to broaden their audience base. With more subscribers on the ad-tier, combined with more precision targeting and data, there’s definitely room to grow monetization. The ceiling is much higher with the right investment and growth strategy.”

HBO is already doing most of the heavy lifting for HBO Max, especially when compared to its high-minded cable counterparts. HBO titles account for 14 percent of the streamer’s library, but more than 18 percent of its audience demand, according to Parrot Analytics. That tops Showtime on Paramount+ (7.2 percent supply vs. 7.3 percent demand) and FX on Hulu (3.6 percent vs. 4.6 percent). 

Who stands to gain the most if WBD is sold?

For better and for worse (mostly the latter), Hollywood is chasing scale to compete. Yet, no one is talking about the potential overlap when it comes to possible streaming combos. Paramount Skydance, Comcast and Netflix could all stand to gain from HBO’s prestige pricing power, but face challenges to continue scaling without sacrificing quality. 

Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults who subscribe to HBO Max also subscribe to Netflix, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. About 40 percent of HBO Max subscribers also use Paramount+, while only 20 percent overlap with Peacock.

“Either Paramount or Comcast would benefit the most,” Hernan Lopez, founder and CEO of media/tech management consulting firm Owl & Co., told Observer. “They would immediately more than double their global revenue and profits from streaming, and the size of the library — both for their own streaming services as well as strategic leverage for negotiation with Netflix.”

The end result for each suitor would be different. Generally speaking, we’re talking about more subscribers, greater pricing power, higher combined lifetime value per customer, higher engagement, lower churn and so on. On paper, that’s awfully tantalizing, though not without its obstacles. 

“Netflix would only fully realize the value of buying WB streaming and studios if it keeps the TV and theatrical studios open, which would mean being willing to make and sell shows to third parties and distribute in theaters—things they haven’t done so far,” Lopez noted. Despite nudges in the theatrical direction, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said as recently as April that movie theaters are an “outmoded idea.” Oof. 

Interestingly, 78 percent of 2025 HBO Max engagement was directed at titles released before 2025, the second-highest rate among the premium streamers, per Samba. That speaks to the enduring power of HBO’s treasured library and the appointment-viewing gaps between high-profile HBO releases. On the flip side, Peacock (64%) boasts the largest share of engagement dedicated to programming that debuted in 2025. Meanwhile, Paramount+’s male-skewing originals fit well with HBO Max’s female-leaning audience. To Lopez’s points, one can see the non-Netflix fits. 

It would be media malpractice to see HBO reduced to a mere tile in another company’s crowded streaming ecosystem. The small screen’s crown jewel deserves better than that, not only for its reputational value but for the tangible results it yields. Yes, time spent has become the all-powerful quarry of every streaming platform. No, HBO is not a content firehose designed to constantly scratch that itch. But much like the throne, crown and sword, the validation it offers is the first step in empowering whomever its parent company may be to rule the realm.

Late-night talk show hosts are intertwined with the meteoric rise of television. From Steve Allen and Johnny Carson to Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, they have helped shape the voice of broadcast and cable across various eras. Yet, when hosts such as Hasan Minhaj, Chelsea Handler, David Letterman, John Mulaney and others have attempted to adopt or reinvent the format for streaming, they have not been met with the same success. 

Has the quality of our talk show hosts somehow declined over the last few decades? Or, like the social opinions of many of our parents, has the format truly reached irrelevance in its old age? Streaming offered creative freedom unfettered by FCC broadcast standards and a seemingly endless budgetary runway. However, the medium’s on-demand culture has never meshed with the timely appointment viewing that made late-night such a revelation on linear TV. 

The numbers don’t lie

Early on, broadcast late-night TV was defined by a few key criteria that made it such a valuable product: heaps of ad revenue from live nightly broadcasts, lower production costs compared with scripted programming, and reliably consistent scheduling that drove habitual tune-in every night. (While costs for late-night on broadcast have ballooned to more than $100 million a year while generating not enough revenue, one can see how that model worked for decades.)

Streaming is built entirely differently. Netflix popularized the cost-plus model, in which producers are paid an upfront flat fee premium, while ad revenue remains minimal today. Batch and binge releases train audiences to consume in short bursts of hyper-engagement rather than regularly scheduled repeatable tune-ins. 

Though some of Netflix’s talk show projects ended before the streamer began releasing engagement reports in 2023, the data we do have still speaks volumes. In the past two years, John Mulaney’s Everybody’s in L.A. and Everybody’s Live, Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act, Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea Does and David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction have all struggled to generate more than a few million hours viewed, according to Netflix’s ratings reports. Putting aside quality, they’ve more or less been met with weak engagement, low retention and niche audience appeal despite the fact that Netflix leads TV sources as the preferred destination for entertainment late at night, per Hub Entertainment Research. 

The deeper question is why. 

Talk shows don’t work on streaming (yet)

Three main factors are contributing to late-night’s decline: functionality mismatches, new media replacements, and discovery and marketing obstacles. 

The enduring appeal of streaming is that it shifts the control from the programmers to the viewers. We can watch anything we want, anytime we want, at any pace we want. That on-demand flexibility is rarely conducive to regular routine for non-scripted entertainment (excluding sports like WWE). The fact that Netflix measures its most-watched programming by viewership in the first 90 days says a lot about how the windows of success are longer in streaming than on linear. Streamers are betting on viewers returning to their favorites and most-anticipated over time. In contrast, late-night revolves around timely and topical humor that affords practically zero catch-up and rewatch value. If you miss it, poof, it’s gone in your mind. No one cares about last week’s headlines. 

Talk show formats live at a very special intersection of news and comedy. Those just so happen to be the primary lanes that social media and podcasts are eating into most. Today, four in ten adults under 30 and one in four over 30 (under 49) get news from TikTok, and the share is growing, according to Pew Research.

One element contributing to CBS’s cancellation of Stephen Colbert was that the “Late Show has by far the smallest digital footprint on YouTube and other platforms,” per Puck News. Comedian Mike Birbiglia echoed a similar sentiment for his side of the tracks when he said on The Town that “podcasts are where people go to find comedy at this point.” There just isn’t a lot of room for this type of entertainment to live these days, at least in its original-ish form. (By the way, Netflix is moving into podcasts.) 

Late-night and talk show formats don’t have a natural fit within streaming’s algorithm-driven model, which runs on genre specificity. If you like true crime, it recommends more true crime. If you like superheroes, it recommends more superheroes. The topical variety of talk shows exists in a disconnected bucket with very little genre affinity to others. 

Unlike massive streaming originals such as Stranger Things or The Boys, these platforms struggle to market a regularly recurring program without a central hook. Splashy guest? Viewers can just go directly to that celeb’s social channels to get their fix. Humor? Go and check out the thousands of stand-up specials available on the same platform. Streamers haven’t yet found a clear viewer incentive to spur live tune-in. 

Final takeaway

The elements that once made late-night programming great—familiar consistency, topical comedy, rare celebrity access, and financial feasibility—are almost diametrically opposed to streaming logic and how it has trained audience behavior. Hosts like Minhaj, Letterman, Handler, and Mulaney continue playing with form and function. Much of it has been highly entertaining, but it has yet to be consistently commercially successful. They are fighting on an entirely different battlefield than the Carsons, Lenos and Stewarts of the past. 

In my former life as a critic, I always argued in favor of analyzing elements of something you loved that didn’t fully coalesce versus dogpiling on something universally disliked. There’s no value in the latter while the former offers pathways to new success. In that spirit, we’re continuing our exploration of The Walt Disney Company’s recent wobbles with a closer look at its animated efforts. Disney is one of the most beloved brands in the world and, at its best, the proud purveyor of unrivaled blockbuster theatrical success. But its bread and butter is getting burned in recent years. 

Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar films Wish ($238 million in worldwide box office), Strange World ($175 million), Encanto ($231 million), Raya and the Last Dragon ($116 million), Soul, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear ($219 million) and Elio ($154 million) struggled commercially amid COVID complications, hybrid streaming releases, or general audience apathy. Disney has absolutely delivered successes in the post-pandemic era. Sequels to Inside Out and Moana crossed $1 billion apiece, Elemental showed off enviable legs, and Encanto is the most-watched movie on streaming in the U.S. over the last five years. But new-to-screen efforts are undeniably struggling due to structural and creative obstacles. 

Structural challenges in Hollywood

Streaming has irrevocably changed audience behavior and preferences, and Disney+ is no exception. But before we get to that, let’s highlight how Disney’s recent moves reflect leadership’s understanding of the need for a refresh for intellectual property development. 

Disney has built its business around four key content pillars: Marvel, Star Wars, Walt Disney Animation and Pixar. “There’s been a very specific way Disney’s animated concepts have been generated over the years,” Simon Pulman, an entertainment lawyer specializing in IP rights at Pryor Cashman, told Observer. “It’s either based on a fairy tale or something that has been generated by their classic braintrust. At some point, you have to ask if any centralized creative force across Hollywood becomes too insular over time?” That question takes on added importance when animated budgets are running $150 million to $200 million-plus while rivals are generating solid ROI at roughly half the cost (hello, Illumination). 

Disney’s animated theatrical fare is typically created in-house. The lack of third-party IP and external development has created a creative bottleneck for many studios relying on recycling library concepts. 

The Mouse House seems to recognize this. It recently made the rare move to acquire the planned five-book series Impossible Creatures, which is currently delighting young adult audiences across the U.S. and U.K.. It’s also expanding its partnership with BBC Studios to bring licensed streaming sensation Bluey to the big screen. 

What else is mobilizing young audiences? Adaptations based on video games, manga and anime—key areas Disney has ignored or previously given up on. That’s changing too. The company invested $1.5 billion into Fortnite maker Epic Games, acquired a 2 percent stake in South Korean digital comics platform Webtoon Entertainment, and has begun dabbling in anime/anime-inspired entertainment with the likes of Star Wars: Visions, Twisted-Wonderland: The Animation, Miraculous Stellar Force and more. 

“Anime has become a global force because it’s unafraid to confront existential stakes,” Derick Tsai, creative executive and producer in games and animation at the IP development studio Magnus Rex, told Observer. He pointed to climate collapse in Nausicaa, alienation in Neon Genesis Evangelion and systemic oppression in Attack on Titan as key examples. “These stories meet audiences where they actually live emotionally, socially and spiritually, and they do it with a sincerity that feels deeply authentic.” 

All of these show Disney slowly but surely breaking with its internal status quo in order to reignite creative engines. But these new creative vessels may not have as much runway if audience behavior can’t be reconditioned. 

Across Hollywood, the pre-streaming era was defined by carefully constructed windows. Films debuted in theaters, became available on home video three to six months later, and then finally hit broadcast and cable TV. The limited availability created a sense of exclusivity and premium allure that drove more urgent theater attendance. The company’s brilliant Disney Vault marketing strategy drove frenzied family purchases for decades. 

“Films felt more like an event and, therefore, very special. Now, it’s all available all the time in one place,” Pulman said. “Parents are running a calculus in their heads as to whether their children are going to terrorize them to see a movie in theaters or if they can wait for Disney+. If kids don’t fear FOMO [fear of missing out] on the playground, then they’re all content to wait.” 

This is reflected in Theatrical Intent scores for Encanto (35 percent), Strange World (44 percent), Wish (49 percent), and Elio (35 percent) in the week of release, which are all much lower than typical animated Disney fare, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. This issue isn’t specific to Disney; it’s an industry-wide epidemic with the advent of streaming. Scarcity once elevated demand. Now, endless availability has conjured apathy. 

Creative challenges amid cultural wars

The culture wars that have engulfed American discourse over the last decade created a hyper-polarized environment. Within the swirling winds of charged opinions, Hollywood is frequently cast in the role of public enemy number one. 

Whether intentional or not, Disney has increasingly found itself at the center of larger machinations related to state and federal issues. Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” bill, corporate DEI initiatives, casting choices across Star Wars, Marvel, The Little Mermaid and other major projects, plot points in Soul, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear and Elio, Jimmy Kimmel and the notion of free speech—all of these elements have generated discussions that divided Disney’s potential audience. Post-COVID films have been viewed by some corners as therapy sessions for their creators, which has creative merit but is not always rooted in broad appeal. 

Speaking generally about Hollywood’s place in the culture wars, Pulman observed that in the period surrounding the COVID pandemic, major entertainment and games companies had become more permissive about employees voicing their political beliefs and infusing creative work with personal ideologies – only to be taken aback when the cultural pendulum swung in the other direction. Owing to several recent controversies, studios seem “afraid of these things being picked up and used as a pawn. That has led to an overcorrection and studios being afraid of having any point of view at all, with a number of projects developed in that period being stripped of certain themes prior to release,” he told Observer. “The solution is probably a back-to-basics rethink on how projects are developed from inception—with an emphasis on universal and character-driven storytelling aimed at general audiences.”

Beyond the political spectrum, Disney animation may also have fallen a touch behind from a thematic and visual standpoint. “Disney’s core themes of believing in yourself, finding strength in family, and discovering that home is inside you are timeless,” Tsai said. “But the world’s hopes and fears have evolved. Audiences today are wrestling with identity in a digital age, climate anxiety and systemic inequality. The stories that resonate most now engage those questions directly with honesty and hope.” 

A successful example is Sony’s Spider-Verse film series, Tsai pointed out. They are superhero stories powered by profoundly modern ideas about authorship, destiny and owning your own narrative. Trojan horsing these contemporary ideals into standard blockbuster story structure is the secret sauce to critical resonance and emotional audience buy-in. Packaging all of this in aesthetically innovative new forms creates a strong theatrical pull (see: Spider-Verse, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Flow, Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle). It’s something Disney needs to further embrace to keep its art fresh. 

“Post-Spider-Verse, audience taste has shifted toward bolder, artist-forward visuals; animation that feels handcrafted and singular,” Tsai said. “Disney started to explore that space with Wish, experimenting with mixing 3D, painterly textures and linework. There’s a huge opportunity to keep pushing in that direction.”

There’s a scene in director Rian Johnson’s still volcanically polarizing Star Wars: The Last Jedi where protagonist Rey is confronted by her own reflection in a Force-swirling cave on the mystical planet Ach-To. In Johnson’s own words, the scene is designed so that Rey sees “who she has to connect with and answer to is herself.” Nearly a decade later, that sentiment has expanded beyond the psyche of the franchise’s characters to encapsulate the very owner of the property itself: The Walt Disney Company. 

In an ideal world, the recently released first teaser for 2026’s The Mandalorian & Grogu, the first Star Wars theatrical film since 2019, would lay the groundwork for a new era of creative blockbusters set in a galaxy far, far away. But instead, the multi-parsec-long laundry list of scrapped projects that precede it serves as a microcosm for Disney’s recent over-reliance on recycling the hits. Across the Magic Kingdom’s war chest of blockbuster intellectual property, major franchises are showing clear signs of fatigue. Repurposing a hit TV series for the big screen may work well for The Mandalorian & Grogu. But the move highlights a bigger issue facing Disney, despite its success, and the industry at large: the difficulty in sustaining long-running brand quality with fresh and urgent big-screen storytelling in an era of growing audience apathy. 

Disney’s franchise fatigue

The problem with repeatedly retreating to the perceived safety of a known commodity is the inevitability of diminishing returns. 

Ever since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker arrived to global disappointment, Star Wars has been confined to its own corner of Disney+ as a purely small-screen series. While that helped drive rapid subscription growth for the Mouse House’s fledgling streamer over the years, the strategy has undoubtedly hit a wall. 

First seasons of Ahsoka (67.8 million), The Acolyte (29.7 million) and Skeleton Crew (5.8 million) delivered far fewer U.S. viewing hours than earlier series premiere seasons like The Book of Boba Fett (79.1 million), Andor (77.4 million) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (76.4 million), according to Nielsen data and analyst Entertainment Strategy Guy. Even flagship series The Mandalorian, the launching pad for this upcoming spin-off movie, saw its third season drop roughly 10 percent in Nielsen viewership from Season 2 while also experiencing a dip in audience demand, per Parrot Analytics. Even more existentially threatening is the possibility that audiences might feel less urgent theatrical intent for the Star Wars brand after roughly 15 TV series. 

And it’s not just Star Wars that is struggling to match prior levels of enthusiasm. Disappointing box office results for recent Marvel Cinematic Universe entries Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts* reflect tepid audience interest in lesser-known characters. The further down the franchise reaches into its bench of names, the harder it is to strike up general recognizability. 

The surprisingly poor legs for The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2.3x domestic multiplier) raise serious doubts about the X-Men reboot’s ability to course correct (Deadpool & Wolverine notwithstanding). Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy, shows that MCU intent conversion—how effectively the franchise converts audience awareness into theatrical interest—has steadily declined since 2022. On the small screen, Daredevil: Born Again failed to make the Nielsen streaming charts this year, while Ironheart also disappointed commercially. 

The struggles across Walt Disney Animation and Pixar—Wish, Strange World, Lightyear, and Elio all flopped—further illuminate the clear pattern of vulnerability across Disney’s major IP pillars. Despite ranking second in box office market share so far this year, Disney’s streaming services account for less than 5 percent of monthly TV usage, per Nielsen. There exists a disconnect between mediums. 

Beyond Star Wars and Marvel

Though we’ll heed LL Cool J’s advice and not call it a comeback, Disney has recovered from cold streaks in the past. The studio enjoyed an animated renaissance across the late 1980s and 1990s by striking gold with The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King and more. And, of course, Bob Iger’s first tenure as CEO was defined by his industry-shifting acquisitions that brought Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm into the fold in the first place. But outside of Marvel and Star Wars, Disney has not produced a live-action, no-doubt-about-it big-screen hit franchise since Pirates of the Caribbean. 

To Disney’s credit, the studio has tried to address this. But The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, John Carter, The Prince of Persia, The Lone Ranger, The BFG, Tomorrowland and A Wrinkle in Time all bombed while more recent-ish attempts such as Artemis Fowl, Mulan and Jungle Cruise were stunted by pandemic headwinds, creative issues or both. On streaming, only Percy Jackson has emerged as a breakout live-action hit beyond Star Wars/Marvel. 

The hope was that the acquisition of Fox’s properties would help fill in some of these gaps. Yet Avatar, for as monstrously lucrative as it is at the box office, endures long stretches between releases and has no franchise extension beyond the films and its attraction at Disney World (which is admittedly pretty damn cool). Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes ($397 million) was the lowest-grossing entry in the franchise since Tim Burton and Mark Wahlberg’s 2001 debacle. We’ll see how Predator: Badlands performs in November after the franchise was relegated to streaming for recent releases. And while Alien Romulus ($351 million) breathed new life into the franchise—likely buoying the successful FX/Hulu series Alien: Earth—Disney can’t count on subsequent films scoring more than $110 million from the unreliable Chinese market. 

What’s the next big thing?

Disney is reportedly seeking out original concepts to appeal to Gen Z men (18-28), including “splashy global adventures and treasure hunts, as well as seasonal fare like films for the Halloween corridor.” At the very least, this signals a self-awareness that trotting out various versions of the same IP over and over again cannot efficiently power Disney’s famous flywheel forever. 

Following the success of Five Nights at Freddy’s and A Minecraft Movie, it’s difficult to see how Disney’s 10 percent ownership stake in video game company Epic Games doesn’t result in a Fortnite movie in the near future. Next year will see the studio release a new Sam Raimi horror film, an original Pixar concept and a sci-fi apocalyptic thriller from 20th Century to pair along with more expected releases such as The Mandalorian & Grogu, Avengers: Doomsday, Toy Story 5, the live-action Moana and Ice Age 6. 

The latter group will undoubtedly bring in big numbers at the box office. But it also exposes how Disney’s foundation is built on decades-old stories. Fatigue is real, and competitors are catching up. Can Disney revitalize its creative pipeline with updated takes before the old reliables dry out? We’ll soon find out.

For years, whispers have percolated around a potential merger or acquisition between Warner Bros. and Paramount (now under Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance, respectively). The tenor of these conversations just rose an octave thanks to reports of the Ellison family preparing for a formal bid. Will this be legacy studios’ best and last chance of creating a real rival to Netflix and YouTube? Or is it simply another experiment that stock-conscious executives hatched? Either way, such a deal would face enormous financial and creative challenges while also holding the potential to transform Hollywood. 

Growing a content library for the sake of volume without any consideration for audience fit is like trying to explain the third act of Tenet to your grandmother—it’s just not going to make sense. But on paper, a combined entity would be armed to the teeth with top-notch brands and talents.

A WBD-Paramount merger would trigger an intellectual property field day with DC, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Dune, Lord of the Rings, The Conjuring, Top Gun, Mission: Impossible, Transformers, Sonic, A Quiet Place and Star Trek under the same corporate parent. Cartoon Network, which the current WBD leadership downsized, might live once more alongside Nickelodeon as an irresistible one-two punch in kids media (or get sold off). Imagine no longer fretting about your overall TV slate because proven hitmakers Chuck Lorre, Taylor Sheridan and Bill Lawrence all work in-house on existing deals. 

“The real test would be creative and product-market fit,” Steve Morris, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency New Media, told Observer.

Theatrical stakes

As of this writing, Warner Bros. accounts for 28 percent of the domestic box office market share while Paramount sits at 6.6 percent. This varies year-to-year, though. Since 2021, Paramount has enjoyed fewer tentpole peaks (Top Gun: Maverick notwithstanding) but delivered steadier conversion of awareness to theatrical intent on a film-by-film basis by opening week, according to Greenlight Analytics, where I work as Director of Insights & Content Strategy. WB’s slate has proven streakier in pre-release tracking, but its impressive highs in awareness, interest and theatrical intent tend to best Paramount’s. 

Warner Bros. targets 12 to 14 theatrical releases annually, while Paramount wants to ramp up to 15 to 20 per year. A merger will almost assuredly reduce total output. 20th Century Fox released an average of 14 annual movies theatrically between 2015 and 2019. That number has dropped to around four under The Walt Disney Company’s ownership. Reducing the number of legacy movie studios again at a time when Big Tech grows stronger in entertainment by the day might cause a full-blown panic throughout the industry. 

Consolidation of this magnitude usually leads to greater franchise dependency, squeezing out mid-budget and indie fare in the process. In turn, this results in less consistent volume for movie theaters (already a problem), less leverage for talent at the negotiating table, and a race toward the middle in terms of creative programming. Not fun. 

Small-screen realities

WBD and Paramount collectively accounted for just over 13 percent of total U.S. TV usage (broadcast, cable, streaming) in July, trailing only YouTube, according to Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge. If we examine combined streaming catalog demand shares, which account for all original and licensed films/TV series on-platform, in the U.S. across 2024, we get a No. 1 ranking at 23.4 percent, according to Parrot Analytics. Even accounting for overlap across both services, the combined customers of WBD (122.3 million worldwide streaming subscribers between HBO Max and Discovery+) and Paramount+ (79 million) would pack a punch.

But WBD thought volume alone would close the gap with Netflix when it smushed together Max and Discovery+. Look at how that turned out. And while select content across Warners and Paramount commands high demand, a potential combo platter wouldn’t necessarily move the engagement needle immediately. 

Unlocking the full value of the combined content catalog would require a complete overhaul of the streaming user interface and experience, an endeavor that’s as costly as it is timely. In the 2020s, with subscription fatigue already gnawing at quarterly earnings and FAST growing faster than SVOD, would both leadership and shareholders really have the patience for such an undertaking? 

Talent and brand tensions

As kid-in-a-candy-store exciting as it would be for content executives to have so much franchise power and top-tier talent at their disposal, the logistical nightmare of balancing so many high-profile spinning plates boggles the mind. The Ellisons may have deep pockets, but funding always remains finite in Hollywood. Leadership would need to decide how to split the pie between, say, competing talent deals such as Tom Cruise and Timothee Chalamet (WBD) versus Will Smith and the Duffer Brothers (Paramount). How would you like to be the executive tasked with explaining to the talent why one slice is smaller than the other? 

No matter which way you cut it, certain talents and brands would inevitably feel shortchanged compared to others. In a town built on egos, you might as well strike a match next to a powder keg. It’s a good problem to have, but the abundance of choice doesn’t guarantee strong strategy and execution. 

Speaking generally about media mergers, Comscore Senior Media Analyst Paul Dergarabedian zeroed in on the brand issue. “Do they get diluted, spun off, marginalized, or are they exploited well to get the best results? That’s got to be part of the equation,” he told Observer. 

Regulatory and financial hurdles

The list of reasons why any such deal can’t or won’t happen runs equally long as why it will. The DOJ and FTC emphasize even greater scrutiny on major M&A these days. Governing bodies would almost assuredly require divestitures, especially if a deal happened before WBD officially split off its cable assets. Some percentage of linear networks on both sides would have to go. It’s hard to see CNN existing alongside CBS News, for example. Even after jettisoning TV channels, both companies would still suffer from over-exposure to the rapidly declining linear TV business. Good luck trying to explain those numbers to angry shareholders. 

WBD’s streaming division profits in part because it includes linear HBO revenues. Meanwhile, Paramount’s streaming business still wasn’t consistently profitable at the time of the sale to Skydance. On top of all that, both companies are saddled with considerable debt at the moment. It’s highly possible that any potential deal is more trouble than it’s worth. 

Any combination of Paramount and Warner Bros. would yield a content slate exploding with blockbuster firepower. The new company (I’m going to start saying WarnerMount from now on) would snatch the franchise crown straight from Mickey Mouse’s head as it fed its streaming and theatrical furnace a steady diet of dynamite. But creative, regulatory, technological and financial challenges rightfully threaten to cloud the starry eyes of ambitious CEOs. (I’d love to see what the Skydance team can do with Paramount on its own). 

Mergers and acquisitions have not proven to be the silver bullet Hollywood hoped they would be over the last 20 years. Would Warners and Paramount be any different? Perhaps. But more often than not, this tactic has been more exposing than helpful.