What’s in This Week’s Issue…

Good morning. For a hundred years, Hollywood ran on one simple balance of power: studios made the movies, theaters showed them, and audiences decided what became a hit.

But this week, that entire system was put at risk of collapsing.

Netflix is now trying to buy Warner Bros, the studio that helped build Hollywood itself. And for the first time, the question isn’t which entertainment company wins.

The question is whether Hollywood survives at all.

So this week…

• 🏆 The Big Play: How Netflix’s attempted takeover of Warner Bros could break Hollywood forever

• 💪 The Power Move: What this power shift means for you

• 💵 Follow the Money: Why is Zelenskyy rejecting Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine

-GEN

🏆 The Big Play

The biggest money power story of the week.

When a Streaming Giant Tries to Swallow a Studio Giant

There has never been a takeover attempt like this one.

Netflix has agreed to acquire Warner Bros’ studio and streaming division for $72 billion in equity value ($82.7 billion including debt).

The deal would give it control over DC, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, HBO, Friends, and a century of film history.

Days later, Paramount countered with a $108.4 billion hostile bid backed by sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.

This isn’t just about a Hollywood studio going up for sale. It’s the prize in a global power struggle.

And the consequences for theatres, creators, culture, and the economics of storytelling are far bigger than the headlines suggest.

Here’s how it all really works:

1. When the Old Hollywood Economics Collide with Netflix

Hollywood has always depended on a slow, carefully tiered release system:

Theatres → rentals → cable → streaming.

Each window created profit, and those profits funded the next round of films as studios relied on long-term profits, not short-term drops.

Netflix destroyed that system.

It replaced those windows with one dominant model: debut directly on streaming and capture the upside through a subscription fee.

And these two systems don’t blend:

• Warner’s movies take years to develop; Netflix needs content every week
• Warner uses franchises to stabilize revenue; Netflix uses subscriber churn to justify constant spending

If Netflix takes over Warner Bros, one of two things happens:

Either Warner Bros is reshaped into a Netflix-style content mill, or Netflix inherits the financial burden of a theatrical studio model it has never run at scale on its own.

Either outcome breaks something.

And that’s why this bid is shaking Hollywood’s foundations.

The stakes only get bigger when you look at the second force.

2. When Control Over Culture Becomes a Monopoly Risk

Warner Bros is not just a studio. It is:

• DC Comics
• HBO
• Warner Bros Pictures
• Warner Bros Television
• The largest film and TV library after Disney

And Netflix is the only truly global distributor with over 300 million paying subscribers.

If one company owns both the content and the global distribution system, Hollywood’s competitive ecosystem collapses.

At the same time, Warner Bros’ creative culture has always been built on risk-taking and long-term franchises. Netflix is built on data-driven commissioning where:

• shows get cancelled quickly
• algorithms decide which stories matter
• creators lose backend earnings
• global homogenization becomes the default style

So, a merged Netflix–Warner Bros becomes a cultural monopoly unlike anything the industry has seen.

And that’s when the third and the biggest domino begins to fall.

3. How This Could Lead to More Piracy

In a previous newsletter, we covered this: consolidation in entertainment pushes audiences into piracy when three things happen simultaneously:

1. prices rise

2. content becomes fragmented

3. choice disappears

Netflix buying Warner Bros accelerates all three:

• In a world where every streaming service becomes expensive, every studio merges into a few giants, and every story is trapped behind a subscription, users begin looking for a free alternative again.

• This is exactly what happened in the early 2010s when cable bundles collapsed, and streaming fragmentation exploded.

• Consumers didn’t pay for 12 services. They downloaded torrents.

And if Warner Bros ends up inside Netflix, or even inside a Paramount-backed merger, the consolidation will push the industry toward the same cycle again:

Fewer studios → fewer distributors → fewer theatrical releases → higher subscription costs → more pressure on creators → more incentives for piracy

That’s why this acquisition attempt is not just another business story.

It’s a story about what happens to culture when power becomes concentrated in too few hands.

💪 The Power Moves

Playbook for understanding the game of power.

What This Means for Your Future

The Netflix–Warner Bros saga isn’t about Hollywood. It’s about how power consolidates in a platform world.

Every industry that moves from “many players” to “one gatekeeper” undergoes the same transformation, and eventually the product becomes optimized for the platform’s incentives and not the public’s needs.

That’s why investors across the world are quietly returning to one asset that still stands outside the system, gold.

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But here’s the thing: most people just let their gold sit there, doing nothing.

That’s where Monetary Metals is changing the game.

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Join thousands of investors earning real yield in physical gold and silver every month with Monetary Metals.

So don’t just hold gold, make it work for you.

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The Takeaway:

When one company controls both what gets made and how it reaches the world, the industry stops serving people and starts serving the platform.

Hollywood might simply be the first visible casualty; your industry may be next.

💵 Following the Money

Three of the wildest financial and corruption stories from around the world.

#1 - Zelenskyy says Ukraine won’t cede land to Russia, rejecting Trump peace plan

#2 - The US spent $145 billion rebuilding Afghanistan. Nearly $30 billion was wasted, a new report says

#3 - World’s first social media ban for kids prompts others to consider restrictions

✨ Poll time!

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