Look, we don’t know what Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos is mad about, when it comes to director James Cameron’s recent letter about the streamer’s dreams of buying Warner Bros. Discovery. We mean, Cameron’s letter—addressed to Utah Senator Mike Lee, head of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee—straight-up called Sarandos “a good person and a clever business leader and innovator”! Sure, it did so in the midst of also calling his company’s plans to buy Warner Bros. “disastrous for the theatrical motion picture business that I have dedicated my life’s work to,” but still: James Cameron’s never called us good people!
But Sarandos just can’t be happy, per Deadline, going on Fox Business on Friday to complain that he’s “surprised and disappointed that James chose to be part of the Paramount disinformation campaign” surrounding the deal. Sarandos took special exception to the part of Cameron’s letter where he talks about an alleged 17-day theatrical window that the studio was supposedly committing to before funneling WBD’s movies onto the conveyer belt toward its big trough of streaming content. “I have never even uttered the words ’17-day window,'” Sarandos asserted during an appearance on Fox’s The Claman Countdown. “So I don’t know where it came from or why he would be part of that machine.”
“I met with James personally in late December,” Sarandos added, “And laid out for him our 45-day commitment to theatrical exhibition of films and to the Warner Bros slate. I have talked about that commitment in the press countless times. I swore under oath in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust that that’s what we would be doing.” But none of that seems to have convinced Cameron, who wrote in his letter—which entered the public record yesterday—that no matter what Sarandos says, Netflix will always be able to change its mind on the matter later.
If nothing else, this little back-and-forth makes it clear that Netflix is—despite having supposedly already won the contest by getting a bid for Warner Bros. accepted, while Paramount continues to try to bounce cash off the front door—still deep in the midst of what’s going to be a nasty messaging war with the David Ellison-owned studio over who will get to own WBD. (Possibly with some serious Congressional help: Lee piped up on social media already this weekend to lay out another list of questions he has for Netflix about the sale.)