The WarnerMount merger is evil, bad, will ruin popular entertainment in the U.S., and I really hope it’s blocked. I wasn’t hot on the Netflix acquisition either, though I appreciated that it would help bring Netflix movies to theaters–something that really appears to be happening in the months since the Warner Bros. sale failed. But WarnerMount–the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. into a David Ellison-controlled megacompany–is just so much more harmful. But… it really seems like it’s going to happen one way or another.
I think, in the end, the state attorneys general are going to come to some compromise. Some assets will be spun off into a separate company, and that separate company will exist for a while until it too gets bought or grows big enough to buy some smaller competitor. The politicians seem single-mindedly focused on CNN and the supposed political control over it, and they’re the last ones holding it back.
I think it’s kinda inevitable.
I’m actually fairly optimistic that these upcoming smaller studios like A24 and Neon, along with the streamers like Netflix, MGM, and Apple TV+, are finally starting to fill the hole that Fox left when Disney absorbed it. However, if Warners and Paramount also merge, I just don’t think there will be enough oxygen in the atmosphere for any studio in Hollywood to fill that space. Which means tens of thousands of jobs lost or reduced as we get fewer movies, fewer shows, and fewer buyers.
For a thought exercise, then, what if New Line, which Warner Bros. purchased in the late 90s, was turned into its own company, holding some franchises, multimedia aspects, and a lean theatrical studio that is designed to compete more with A24 and Lionsgate than to rival the big ones? Could that fill the void?
So… What would a “good” spin-off be in a WarnerMount New Line Spinoff? If New Line were assembled from parts, how could we make it a viable competitor?
My WarnerMount New Line Spinoff Pondering
In my thought exercise, New Line, by force of attorneys general or David Ellison’s desperation, splits off little parts of both Warner Bros. and Paramount. In the end, this will be another conglomerate with its hand in many pies, but all of them relatively small. In a less charitable read, this would be Ellison’s attempt to create a “Dish 5G” situation with a doomed-to-fail company. But let’s pretend the suits manage to make New Line into a legitimate company.
I’ll pick and choose a few media properties from each medium and try to make a decent little company that has “brand synergy” and an easy path to survival. Obviously, without making it so powerful that it outclasses WarnerMount, because that would defeat the purpose.
I can’t rip away “core franchises” from Warners or Paramount, and I can’t make New Line “too powerful,” but anything else is fair game.
Here we go…
Film – New Line Horror
New Line used to be one of the mini-major studios in Hollywood, making smaller movies, horror, that kind of thing. Then it got bought by Turner, then Turner got bought by Time Warner, then Time Warner merged with AOL, then… It’s a long story.
We can’t cleanly de-merge New Line, because it was fully absorbed in 2008. But we can pick some of the pieces back out. For starters, Warner Bros. the film distributor will largely go towards New Line. That way, we can avoid most of the massive studio-level layoffs sure to come when WarnerMount happens.
Obviously, New Line Horror will be the crown jewel. That includes some historic franchises like:
- Nightmare on Elm Street,
- Friday the 13th,
- Final Destination,
- The Conjuring,
- Evil Dead,
- Critters,
- Mortal Kombat,
- IT,
- those kinds of movies.
But most of those are either inactive or winding down. Conjuring aside, none of these are making $100m+ domestic at the box office anytime soon. To bolster that, Paramount will donate its main horror franchises:
- Scream
- A Quiet Place
Again, not franchises I see thriving in 10-15 years, but a good catalog that indicates some good priorities. This is a studio that could take on A24 for horror, with bigger budgets and bigger thrills–at least for horror, where budgets are never exactly huge. This creates a safety net that lets New Line build up to be a genuine competitor to Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, too.
New Line used to be pretty big for romantic comedies, but that’s a very hard genre to make work these days in theaters, and there’s not really any franchises anyway. I can at least give them back the Friday series, for whatever that’s worth!
Film – New Line Big Creators
Which big creators, either directors or producers, will “shift” to New Line? This isn’t ncessarily IP ownership, but relationships with creators that will hopefully last many years:
- JJ Abrams (whose TV work for Warners has gone for many years, but who also made the Cloverfield franchise for Paramount)
- John Krasinski (who’s made plenty of Paramount movies over the years)
- Oddfellows, just yank that away before it gets big
- Timothee Chalamet (who works with WB a lot)
- Lee Cronin (the sick and twisted mastermind behind Lee Cronin’s The Mummy)
- Spyglass Entertainment minority shareholder (They’re best known these days for Scream, but also produced movies like the Hellraiser reboot and Paddington 3)
And then one big partnership that will basically “ensure” the studio can survive the next 10 years:
Film – The Big Partnership – Legendary or Hasbro
I don’t know which one is better, so pick whichever you like more.
Legendary is a famous movie production company responsible for the Godzilla vs. Kong Monsterverse stuff, Dune, Minecraft, Pacific Rim, and more. Aside from a blip in the mid-10s, they’ve primarily been associated with Warner Bros., who co-produces and distributes their films.
Hasbro is the giant toy company closely tied to Paramount for many years, with series like Dungeons & Dragons, GI Joe, Transformers, Magic the Gathering, and My Little Pony.
For this spin-off, New Line would get an exclusive deal with one of these two companies that lasts 10 years minimum, and access to all the franchises that aren’t tied up in rights issues.
I would definitely go with Legendary here, but Hasbro definitely has stronger potential for licensing and for TV.
And with that in mind…
TV – Turner Networks
A lot of the Warner cable networks will suddenly go with New Line. Turner briefly owned New Line before it itself was absorbed, so it makes sense to try and pull some of that back out. Not that TV stations are exactly a huge cash cow anymore, but let’s also assume that many of the famous shows from these channels also go with New Line:
- TBS
- TNT
- CNN
- Turner Classic Movies
- Cartoon Network
- Adult Swim
In addition, they’ll get two of Paramount’s TV assets:
- MTV, VH1 (50% joint ownership with WarnerMount)
- BET Networks
The big one in my biased brain is Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. Under the current deal, both of those would merge with the same company as Nickelodeon and MTV, and you can easily see how that would be extremely messed up!! You can NOT have the two big TV animation companies becoming one!
TV – New Line Animation – Cartoon Network
Of course, de-merging Cartoon Network from Warner Animation, which collapsed together in the early 20s, will be tricky and annoying. But that’s for the pencil pushers to deal with.
The Great Divorce of the TV animation industry. De-consolidating what’s been brought together over 35 years. So we’re talking…
- Most of Hanna-Barbera pre-1990 – It will travel to New Line, its new home.
- Cartoon Network, and all Hanna-Barbera post-1990 – New Line
- Scooby-Doo – The big exception, will stay with WarnerMount.
- Looney Tunes – WarnerMount
- Warner Animation the Film Division – WarnerMount
- That Upcoming Hello Kitty Movie – New Line!
- Tom & Jerry and the other MGM Animation guys, – They will get sold back to MGM instead of spun off to New Line for no other reason than I said so. 100 years of tribulations finished
- Adult Swim – Everything except Rick & Morty will fly to New Line. Warners will keep Rick & Morty for some reason even as it’s a fading IP.
- MTV Animation – South Park and Beavis & Butthead stay WarnerMount. Everything else goes to New Line.
- Nickelodeon – WarnerMount, EXCEPT for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which will become owned by New Line to bring things full circle. Paramount keeps distribution though.
It’s a messy, messy breakup. The creative teams will face years of turmoil in the chaos. Former brand IP synergy stuff like Scoob! But it’s a better compromise than merging Warner Animation with Nickelodeon!!
I also think merging Adult Swim and MTV animation feels a little sacrilegious, but honestly MTV Animation hasn’t been particularly robust in recent decades, so it’s an easier deal. South Park would also have gone New Line, but the rights battles with that between Warner Bros and Paramount were so dramatic that I feel like they’ll never give that up.
Video Games – Midway Games
Warner Bros Games has been at risk of selling itself off for several years now; here’s a chance for that to work out before more great studios like Monolith Productions are closed.
Since Warners has barely done anything at all with Midway Games in the last 20 years, let’s spin off all those assets into a new studio. Listen, AAA video games are in a real tough spot these days, so this could be a disaster move. You have to make sure some real savvy people are in charge who want to make some of the money, not all of the money; this studio’s gotta be all AA, all the time. No live service looter shooters allowed.
Netherrealm Studios, of course, will go with Midway. Mortal Kombat is a deeply tied New Line franchise, so it’s a must in any scenario.
After that… Traveler’s Tales would sure be nice! But if you remove TT, Warner Bros. Games as a studio might be too small? I’m not sure. The bean counters can decide, but I’ll say yes for now.
Publishing – MAD Magazine
DC has so thoroughly absorbed all of its imprints that I couldn’t get anything else, OK?
Just for the sake of forcing New Line to have some finger in every medium they can, we’ll give them MAD Magazine, the wonderful-but-basically-irrelevant-now pop culture comics magazine. Starting now, the U.S. State Attorneys General give New Line Publishing a mandate–“Make MAD Mega, Man.”
They’ll get the rights to reprint all the former Cartoon Network/Hanna-Barbera comics, especially the acclaimed 2015 revival, but also a full staff and the goal to turn MAD into a relevant brand again, whatever the cost.
With Adult Swim and half of MTV, with MAD Magazine and New Line Horror you have so many legacy Gen X icons all in one place… Surely they can do something neat with that.
Streaming – Pluto TV
Not everyone wins in the streaming wars. New Line will be gifted Pluto TV, the free streamer you go to after you got bored with Tubi, Roku, and Plex. Like… It’s fine. Tubi shows you can do fine with the free streamer model. Sony also shows you don’t need a streaming service to be a successful media conglomerate. I’m mainly giving this to New Line to reduce WarnerMount’s power, not to bolster New Line’s.
Other Mergers & Acquisitions
New Line is just the right size where it has room to grow, or room to end up getting bought by some other company later. I’m imagining that, 4-5 years after the WarnerMount New Line spinoff, they’ll start acquiring some properties to make the brand stronger. For example:
- “Fellowship Entertainment” – after Embracer shreds and destroys itself; this holding company will own Eidos Games (Tomb Raider), Dark Horse Comics, and Middle-Earth Enterprises. In the extremely unlikely scenario that WarnerMount gives up the Lord of the Rings rights instead of some of the other stuff I listed above, this merger is an inevitability–there is a lot of gravity towards uniting those LOTR rights under one studio.
- Viz Media, which is currently owned by a Japanese book conglomerate, which means a tangled mess of subsidaries to deal with. But Viz Media by itself would be a massive licensing cash-cow, and a legitimate book publisher as well. Or, the reverse, if New Line got absorbed into the Japanese machine just like Columbia 35 years ago.
- Neon – I just know Neon is gonna get sold in the next 10 years. Might as well consider New Line
The End Result of the WarnerMount New Line Spinoff?
If you haven’t picked up on my deal already, I’ve basically crafted the ultimate Gen X Nostalgia Studio. The iconic franchises that kids born in the 60s-70s grew up with, and the edgy art they made in the 90s-00s. This studio is filled with once-legendary IP that are getting a bit long in the tooth–and that’s sort of by design.
It means the studio can start hammering out releases immediately and start competing without trouble releasing anything of note. So many would-be studios like STX, Open Road, Summit, FilmDistrict, and even Dreamworks crashed and burned because they couldn’t make any Big Hits; they’d have a few decent successes, but never enough to sustain the losses from the flops.
A slate of classic franchises guarantees at least a little cushioning, but it’s also a safety net with some tears in there. You can survive a few years on Nightmare on Elm Street, Ninja Turtles, Mortal Kombat, and Flintstones. But you can’t succeed forever with this stuff. They’ll have to build all-new IP. They’ll have to work with brand-new creators. But at least they have a fighting chance.
And the WarnerMount that remains after all these franchises got peeled off? Perfectly fine.
In Reality
There’s no way a merger settlement would ever get as granular as this. Knowing how the Attorney General lawsuit is mostly grandstanding by Rob Bonta to get political points about CNN, I’m betting the eventual settlement will be basically, spin off CNN and some other insubstantial assets, and watch those get bought by private equity and drained until gone. I don’t think there’s enough interest in creating a viable company out of the spinoff to actually push it… Unless this drags on until 2027.
I’m hoping for the best. I’m hoping this WarnerMount merger just gets blocked.
But I hope I demonstrated you can make a real competitor if you at least give it a real shot.
