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A Fading Studio System
December 29, 2025
When Disney bought Fox a few years ago, we lost one of the venerable studios among the group that founded the studio system at the beginning of the last century.
Now, Warner Bros. is on the verge of being bought by Netflix or Paramount Skydance, depending on what the shareholders decide and how the regulatory winds blow.
Years before this era, MGM was the major studio on the block, passing through the ownerships of businessmen Kirk Kerkorian and Ted Turner, among others. After being passed around, filing bankruptcy and losing some of its library (including its 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, which ended up at Warner), the studio finally landed at a streamer under Amazon MGM Studios, a shadow of its former glory.
Warner, too, may end up a cog in the machinery of a streamer’s overall business under Netflix, or subsumed into another studio, Paramount, much like Fox was at Disney.
Either way, it would be yet another casualty in the dismantling of the studio system that brought us so many classics, built the infrastructure of the movie business, had physical lots that grounded them in Southern California and created what everyone thinks of as “Hollywood.”
Change is inevitable in the entertainment business, and we’ve weathered a lot of it in recent years. While I’m hopeful that some of the magic that the studio system created will stick around, I feel it’s certain to fade.
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