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If Ted Sarandos is concerned about any competitive edge that a Paramount/Warner Bros. merger might pose, he’s not showing it. Speaking Wednesday at the Bloomberg Screentime conference, Sarandos was mostly dismissive
of any rivalry: “It’s looked on paper so far it’s one and one,” he said, referring to the company’s two streaming services. “So I don’t know if one and one is two, or one and one is one and a half, or one and one is three.”
When asked about rampant rumors that Sarandos had been courting HBO/HBO Max content chairman Casey Bloys for a job or production deal, the exec downplayed it. “He’s a good guy. For some reason, we had a very well-publicized lunch. We have eaten together many times … He’s going to be in a very good position wherever he does. He’s a super talented guy.”
The news of Bloys’ ascension to take over Paramount+ alongside HBO Max has not officially been announced, but with a judge giving the final sign-off Wednesday to let the merger proceed, the deal — and some of the new structure, including Bloys’ role — is expected to be announced next week.
Does Sarandos regret Netflix’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery? “No, I think the plan was solid,” he said. “We won the deal at some point, so we priced it right. At our scale, that was the top price point where I thought we could return value to our shareholders with that asset. Any more than that, I thought we’d be taking into negative territory, even with our scale. The deal itself kind of threw the business narrative off for investors, for the press, for other folks. You have to be willing to put the business narrative at risk for something that’s good for the long term of the business.”
Meanwhile, Sarandos addressed his relationship with Donald Trump — and whether he thinks a federal production tax credit can happen.
Sarandos defended Trump when it came to this topic: “For everything else you might think, he is a guy who really cares about the entertainment business, and he cares about protecting the industry and creating jobs, and he loves creating jobs in the entertainment business in America,” Sarandos said. “We talk a lot about how that could work and what’s the upside and the downside of that.
“We’ve shot in all 50 states, so we understand where it works and where it doesn’t, where these incentives actually do create jobs and where they don’t,” he added. “A good chunk of the production in America has gone to the U.K. because it’s a very big, very attractive incentive. Public companies have a fiduciary responsibility to deliver the most they can for the money, so they chase those incentives all over the place. In the U.S., the states compete with each other for that, but they do not compete well with other countries for it in total. So the federal incentive, which would be a layer of incentive that would go on top of the states’ incentives, would compete with other countries and bring those keep those jobs back in America.”
Sarandos noted that Netflix has filmed all over the country and has seen where state incentives work best, and he singled out New Jersey as being the most competitive in the country. On the flip side, he warned that California — and Los Angeles in particular — is still not keeping pace.
“I just think over the years, California got complacent that the talent was here,” he said. “They let the infrastructure age. They make it very difficult to shoot in the city of Los Angeles. I tell you, we just finished the David Fincher’s movie (‘The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth’) and it was no walk in the park.”
Sarandos opened his conversation by answering questions about Netflix’s slower growth (2% year-over-year growth in user engagement during the first half in 2026).
“Yes, overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster,” he said. “We are, though, also doing things that create a lot of headwind to that number. Meaning, when we do live programming on Netflix, which is a relatively new thing, we spend about 5% of our content budget on live events. They generate about 1% of our watching.
“We are growing the business,” he added. “We want to keep growing it faster. This past quarter, we did double-digit revenue growth in every region of the world. So the business is great and growing fine.”
As for adding more content to the service, besides podcasts, he points to the distribution deal Netflix made in France with TF1. “We should be much more nimble to be able to add new ways to watch on Netflix over time,” he said.
Also, as Netflix prepares to release “La Bola Negra” in October with the longest theatrical runway in the streamer’s history, Sarandos said they’ll continue to play with windows. Already, Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” next year will become the first Netflix release to receive a conventional theatrical rollout, with a 49-day window preceding its April 2 streaming debut.
“So what we’re doing is looking at this model and saying, OK, how do we serve movie lovers who may want to see this movie in a theater, and how do we not harm value to Netflix?” he said. “Last year, we put over 30 movies in the theaters, all with bespoke plans of how many days are going to be out, how much marketing to spend, what cities to play them in. What you figure out is that on one end of the spectrum is ‘La Bola Negra,’ ‘Train Dreams’ last year, that could have played in the theaters for six months. Those kind of art house films play like that. And then the other end is the four-quadrant family rewatch movie, so we said, let’s take those two and treat them different. So we’re going to do a big wide release for ‘Narnia’ next year, and we’ll do a big wide release for ‘Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory’ at the end of the year. We think they’ll do great, and when the ‘K-pop Demon Hunters’ sequel comes, you could expect a very broad theatrical release.”
