For the overwhelming majority of people whose families, jobs, and personal pursuits loom larger than the endless mergers and acquisitions in Hollywood, the hue and cry over Netflix’s plans to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery is likely to elicit not much more than a shrug. To most ordinary, well-adjusted people, the ownership of a movie studio is not much more consequential than the ownership of a baseball team or a chain of restaurants. As long as they still play ball, serve burgers, or, indeed, make movies, who cares?

Admittedly, there is an element of preciousness in all the worry over Warner Bros. being gobbled up by Netflix. After all, it has been a long, long time since studio head Jack Warner roamed the backlot of the studio responsible for such classic films as Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and Now, Voyager. Furthermore, like all movie studios, Warner Bros. is no stranger to being incorporated into larger, seemingly unlikely corporations: In 1969, the studio, which, having already been purchased by Seven Arts, was then known as Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, was acquired by the little-remembered Kinney National Service, whose portfolio of businesses included such inspiring enterprises as operating parking garages. The next time you watch Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, note that an opening credit identifies Warner Bros. as “A Kinney Company.” Does the fact that Kubrick’s universally acclaimed masterpiece was, apparently, funded by parking garage revenue make its notably unpromising vision of the future more or less dystopian?

Yet even as Warner Bros. found itself unceremoniously paired with companies such as Kinney National Service or, in later decades, Time Inc. and America Online, the studio itself remained faithful to its founding purpose: to produce good movies, and to release those movies in large, cavernous structures staffed by unhappy teenagers and marked by the persistent aroma of popcorn. To the uninitiated, such places are popularly known as movie theaters. This commitment survived even Warner Bros.’s rather bizarre union with Discovery, the purveyor of such low-rent cable channels as Food Network, HGTV, and the Travel Channel, in 2022.

If I may be permitted to put on my film critic hat for a moment, I make no great claims for the recent output of Warner Bros. Discovery, but the fact remains that the executives charged with greenlighting productions have been........

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