The Desperate Scramble for Scale
Let’s be brutally honest. The old Hollywood model is dead and buried. The streaming revolution, led by the likes of Netflix and Amazon, has turned the entertainment world into an arms race. The weapon of choice? Content. Heaps and heaps of it. In this new world, being a mid-sized studio is like turning up to a gunfight with a butter knife. You need a vast library of films and programmes just to get a seat at the table, and the financial firepower to spend billions a year just to stay there.
This is why size suddenly matters more than anything else. Companies are realising they either need to buy or be bought. It’s a simple, brutal calculation. Combining operations allows them to spread the astronomical costs of making new shows across a much larger subscriber base, whilst trimming the fat of duplicated departments. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the cold logic driving this entire trend.