Ted Sarandos, Paramount/Warner Bros. If he is worried about the competitive advantage his merger could create, he doesn’t show it. Speaking at the Bloomberg Screentime conference on Wednesday, Sarandos mostly downplayed any competition: “It’s one and one on paper so far,” he said, referring to the company’s two streaming services. “So I don’t know if one plus one is two, one plus one and a half, or one plus one is three.”
The executive downplayed it when asked about widespread rumors that Sarandos was flirting with HBO/HBO Max head of content Casey Bloys for a business or production deal. “He’s a good guy. We had a very well-publicized lunch for some reason. We’ve had dinner together many times… He’s going to be in a very good position wherever he is. He’s a super talented guy.”
News of Bloys’ takeover of Paramount+ along with HBO Max has not been officially announced, but the deal and some of the new structure, including Bloys’ role, are expected to be announced next week, with a judge on Wednesday giving the final signature to allow the merger to go forward.
Sarandos, Netflix’s Warner Bros. Does Discovery regret its offer? “No, I think the plan was sound,” he said. “At one point we won the deal, so we priced it right. At our scale, it was the highest price point where I thought we could bring value to our shareholders with this asset. Moreover, even with our scale, I thought we were going to get into downside territory. The deal itself kind of threw off the business narrative for investors, the press and other people. You have to be willing to risk the business narrative for something that will be good for the business long term.”
Meanwhile, Sarandos touched on his relationship with Donald Trump and whether the federal production tax credit will happen.
Sarandos defended Trump when it came to this: “Despite everything you might think, he’s a guy who really cares about the entertainment industry, he cares about protecting the industry and creating jobs, and he loves creating jobs in the entertainment industry in America,” Sarandos said. “We talk a lot about how this could work and what the positives and negatives of this are.
“We’ve shot in all 50 states, so we understand where it’s working, where it’s not working, where these incentives are actually creating jobs and where they’re not,” he added. “A lot of the manufacturing in America has gone to the UK because it’s a huge, very attractive incentive. Public companies have a fiduciary responsibility to do the best they can for the money, so they’re chasing those incentives everywhere. In the US, the states compete with each other for that, but in the aggregate they don’t compete well with other countries for it. So the federal incentive, which would be a layer of incentives that would go on top of the states’ incentives, would compete with other countries and bring in those who keep them. Jobs in America.”
Sarandos singled out New Jersey as the most competitive location in the country, noting that Netflix shoots all over the country and has seen where state incentives work best. On the other hand, he warned that California, and especially Los Angeles, still cannot keep up with this pace.
“I think over the years California has appreciated having this talent here,” he said. “They’re letting the infrastructure age. They’re making it very difficult to shoot in the city of Los Angeles. I’m telling you, we just finished David Fincher’s movie (“The Next Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth”) and it wasn’t a walk in the park.”
Sarandos began his conversation by answering questions about Netflix’s slower growth (2% annual increase in user engagement in the first half of 2026).
“Yes, overall we are not growing as fast as I would like, and we are working to make that progress faster,” he said. “But we’re also doing things that are counterproductive to that number. So 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 account for about 1% of our viewing.”
“We are expanding the business,” he added. “We want to continue to grow faster. Last quarter, we had double-digit revenue growth in every region around the world. So the business is great and growing well.”
He points to Netflix’s distribution deal with TF1 in France for adding more content besides podcasts to the service. “We have to be much more agile so we can add new ways to watch on Netflix over time,” he said.
Additionally, as Netflix prepares to release “La Bola Negra,” which has the longest theatrical run in the streamer’s history, in October, Sarandos said they will continue to play with windows. Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” is already set to become the first Netflix movie to debut in traditional theaters next year, with a 49-day window before it begins streaming on April 2.
“So we look at this model and say, well, how do we serve moviegoers who might want to watch this movie in the theater and not hurt the value of Netflix?” he said. “Last year, we put more than 30 movies into theaters, all with specific plans for how many days to run, how much to spend on marketing, what cities to play in. You realize at one end of the spectrum there’s ‘La Bola Negra,’ ‘Train Dreams,’ which might have been in theaters for six months last year. That’s how these kinds of art films play. And at the other end there’s the four-quarter family rewatch movie, so we said, ‘Let’s take those two and treat them differently.’ So next year we’re going to have a big release for ‘Narnia’ and at the end of the year we’re going to have a big release for ‘Charlie the Chocolate Factory’ as well. “We think they’ll do great, and you can expect a very wide theatrical release when the sequel to ‘K-Pop Demon Hunters’ arrives.”