In the past, when studios had enough power to not live under the threat of television or an eccentric and ultraconservative millionaire, Warner was known as the home of the working class. While Metro, back in the years after the Depression and beyond, entertained itself by making elegant films infected with glamour like Grand Hotel (1932), the studio of the four brothers got their hands dirty producing films like Little Caesar, The Roaring Twenties, The Maltese Falcon, or White Heat. Names like Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, or Raoul Walsh shaped the imagery of a world inherently and necessarily mean. And, therefore, essentially real. Then, ironically, Warner's name would become associated with franchises like Harry Potter, with superheroes like Batman or Joker, with names like Christopher Nolan, and with confusingly feminist dolls like Barbie. But that's another story.
The Oscar nominations for 2026 have brought back the present and life with three dozen nominations to a studio on the verge of disappearing or, less tragically, changing ownership. In the battle between the current owners of Paramount led by magnate David Ellison and Netflix to acquire one of the major Hollywood defining companies, it is the latter who currently have the upper hand. It's hard to resist, say those in the know, the new bid of $27.75 per share in cash (no mixing cash and shares of the capital N network) for the studios, the HBO Max platform, and the associated debt of $82.7 billion.
Films nominated for the 2026 Oscars: complete list of nominations
Where to watch Sinners, the film with the most nominations for the 2026 Oscars: these are the platforms
It is curious that the three films that can be acquired, almost unintentionally, with the Netflix stamp for $27 and a few cents are almost by definition the opposite of a film to watch streaming. None of those mentioned in the previous paragraph either, but the proposals of both Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson, and also, to a lesser extent, Zach Cregger's are essentially, each in its own way, a declaration of faith (and also of love) in the dark room, in the conception of cinema as a total experience for immersion in a different, transformative, and unique world. It sounds poetic and, indeed, neither the sound nor the music nor the IMAX format image of Coogler's 'bluesy' vampires nor Thomas's low-flying pursuits nor Cregger's depth of terror at night admit any format other than the movie theater.
On the other hand, the recurring theme of films produced by Netflix has been in one way or another cinema itself or the directors' experience with cinema. What Ted Sarandos and his team have offered to the various filmmakers they have worked with has been the opportunity to complete projects that were too expensive and always postponed, where cinema itself or a very personal experience of the creators (or both mixed) is the argument in a more or less clear way of the film itself. In other words, except in Emilia Pérez, a film to which Netflix joined once completed, politics has never been a concern.
For some reason, it seems that both Sinners, a predominantly anti-racist film, and One battle after another, a predominantly anti-xenophobic film, and Weapons, a film that portrays the paranoia of middle-class America today from the horror genre, bring back Warner in its final breath before the sale the spirit of what made it great and identifiable in the 1930s. Warner, remember, was the first studio to address Nazism in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939). It seems that Warner is becoming Warner again when it is about to cease to be so. And who knows if the future of cinema is not being played out right now at Warner on the way to Netflix. In a Mephistophelian gesture, Netflix snatches Warner's soul and with it for just a few coins takes what it so desired: the Oscar, the prestige, the very cinema.