There’s an interesting Rorschach test happening in Hollywood at the moment, as various major players have to ask themselves: “Which giant monster would I least like to see devour classic movie studio Warner Bros.?” (Which is also a giant monster, of course, albeit one with a long history attached to its various corporate tentacles.) Given that the fight seems to be mostly boiling down to Netflix vs. Paramount—with one representing a sort of invasive streamer species that’s been encroaching on Hollywood’s territory for the last 15 years, and the other the forward-probing mouth of David Ellison’s ever-hungry and conservative-minded Skydance, and with both acting as major Hollywood employers—you might think filmmakers might get a little leery about weighing in. But not James Cameron, who’s out here writing letters to senators to try to get Congress to block Netflix’s pending acquisition of WBD.
This (per Variety) is not wholly surprising: Cameron is one of those directors who is Extremely Serious about theatrical releases, and understandably smells a rat in Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos’ various promises that he won’t immediately turn Warner Bros. into a factory designed to churn out an endless tide of disposable streaming “hits” for his company. To that end, Cameron has just been revealed to have written a letter last week to Republican Senator Mike Lee, chair of the Senate subcommittee on antitrust—and he was in full-on Sarah Conner mode when he wrote it.
“I believe strongly that the proposed sale of Warner Brothers Discovery to Netflix will be disastrous for the theatrical motion picture business that I have dedicated my life’s work to,” Cameron wrote, according to CNBC, which got its hands on the letter. “Of course, my films all play in the downstream video markets as well, but my first love is the cinema.” Highlighting the thousands of jobs that get created with each Avatar movie he makes, Cameron got into some dire soothsaying, writing, “If such films are no longer green-lit because the market contracts further, which the Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers will certainly accelerate, then many jobs will be lost. Theaters will close. Fewer films will be made. Service providers such as VFX companies will go out of business. The job losses will spiral.”
Calling Sarandos “a good person and a clever business leader and innovator,” Cameron nevertheless states that the goals of Netflix itself “are directly opposed to the health of the cinema marketplace.” And don’t even get him started on Sarandos’ promise to maintain 17-day theatrical windows for Warner Bros. movies: Besides calling that “token window” “ridiculously short” and “grotesquely inefficient,” Cameron also makes it clear that he doesn’t trust Netflix to stick to it for any significant length of time. To be clear, the Avatar director isn’t screaming “So make them sell to Paramount, instead”; he’s just opining, as a guy who’s made a lot of insanely successful decisions about movie theaters over the years, that he thinks Netflix buying Warner Bros. will be disastrous for that industry. (Cameron is also, as we have to remind ourselves sometimes when the man gets a decent head of steam under him, genuinely a pretty funny dude when he feels like it; at one point, while noting that he’s not as well-versed on antitrust as others, he writes “I am but a humble movie farmer.”)
Cameron wrote his letter to Lee in the aftermath of an antitrust subcommittee meeting back on February 3, where Sarandos and WBD executives both testified; Lee has said he intends to hold a follow-up meeting to air more concerns like the ones raised in the director’s letter. You can read the full text of Cameron’s missive here.