With Netflix employees still absorbing the news that the streamer won’t be buying Warner Bros. per the two companies’ December 5 agreement, co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters held a brief town hall Friday morning.
The 15-20-minute affair was moderated by Netflix Chief Communications Officer Dani Dudeck and did not include a Q&A section, sources said.
In their remarks, Sarandos and Peters sounded confident about their decision to walk away from Warner Bros. and explained their reasons.
According to sources, they said that they had a number for the storied film and TV studio and knew what it had to be in order to make sense for the company. When the Warner Bros. Discovery board came back with the recommendation for the higher price offered by Paramount and asked Netflix to match it, the duo’s response was a quick no. Sarandos and Peters noted that they had done due diligence and didn’t feel like they needed to prolong the process if the number was above the threshold they had set.
In justifying their call, Sarandos and Peters used a version of the line they used in yesterday’s “thanks but no thanks” reply to WBD‘s request for a higher bid, that acquiring Warner Bros. “was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”
They also touted a strong year ahead for Netflix and momentum through 2030, a milestone year the streamer had been building to.
Sarandos and Peters went on to thank employees, including those who had spent the last month and a half working on integration that didn’t happen, and asked people to go carry on with their work.
They may have showed restrain and discipline in walking away, but that does not mean that Sarandos and Peters were not disappointed by the outcome of the Warner Bros. sale. Sarandos, in particular, had made it clear how much he wanted the century-old studio. With Paramount’s hostile takeover efforts ramping up in the past couple of weeks, he went on a publicity tour, talking up Netflix’s cause in several interviews, and was in Washington D.C. for meetings about the Netflix-WB deal when news of WBD board’s recommendation came in Thursday afternoon.
Like the Warner Bros. Discovery town hall, which was held an hour earlier this morning, the 9 AM PT Netflix one was scheduled last minute, after WBD Board’s Paramount “superior offer” declaration Thursday afternoon and Netflix’s pullout an hour and a half later. Incidentally, it was the second Netflix town hall this week; the streamer also held their regular quarterly town hall a couple of days ago, I hear.
As for Netflix staff’s reaction to losing Warner Bros., it is said to be mixed, with people divided over the news but virtually all stunned by it.
“The office was quiet yesterday,” one person said.
