The Man Who Wants Netflix to Save Hollywood

Ever since Netflix announced a deal to acquire Warner Brothers back in December, some Hollywood creatives have been shaking in their boots. A lot of the concern is just sort of that these guys are the disruptors from Silicon Valley. They're a tech company. That's my colleague, Joe Flint. What are they gonna do? And we're all gonna be making movies and TV shows based off their algorithms and creativity will fly out the window. So all the Netflix boogie monsters are are coming out, right now. The deal isn't yet finalized. But if Netflix is successful, the merger would create a Hollywood behemoth, marrying the world's biggest streaming service with one of Hollywood's most storied studios filled with important IP. Hollywood would prefer that no one buy Warner Brothers because anytime one of these companies gets sold, there's one fewer entity to sell a project to. There's one fewer company to do business with. And one of the men who'd be at the helm of this new entertainment juggernaut is Netflix co CEO Ted Sarandos. Does Ted Sarandos wanna be the king of Hollywood? Some might argue Ted is already the king of Hollywood, but, if he gets the Warner deal, he'll have a castle to go with his kingdom. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Thursday, January 8. Coming up on the show, the rise of Ted Sarandos and his fight to win Warner. Hey. It's Ryan. Thanks for being a listener to our show. If you're looking for more deeply reported stories like the ones we share every day, consider becoming a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal. Visit subscribe.wsj.com/thejournal to subscribe now. Alright. Let's talk about Ted Sarandos' origin story. Where is he from, and how did he even wind up in the entertainment industry to begin with? Well, Ted grew up in Arizona, and he took a job in a video store when he was, you know, in between high school and sort of going to college. And he was a movie buff, and he always honestly, he kinda loved the types of movies that weren't ever coming to Phoenix. He was a little bit of an indie movie fan. Sarandos rose to the ranks and worked his way up from store clerk to regional distributor. He's getting to know people and doing deals with with studios to acquire content to put on the shelves. So in the course of doing that, he starts to get a little bit of a, you know, reputation as a sharp guy when it comes to doing these sorts of deals. Sarandos eventually got on the radar of Reed Hastings, who was just a couple years into launching a mail order DVD company called Netflix. In 2000, Hastings hired Sarandos to oversee content acquisition, but soon, Sarandos was thinking bigger. As Netflix, you know, kind of began to move its business from mail DVDs to online, Ted was a very …