We recently learned that Warner Bros. Discovery has licensed out most of the DC Extended Universe to Netflix in what's likely to be a big-money deal. A handful of titles were missing, and many fans have wondered whether it's a sign the studio is looking to move on from the DCEU with DC Studios' DCU reboot fast approaching.
Talking during Disney's Q4 investor call yesterday evening, Disney CEO Bob Iger appeared to take a shot at his fellow studio boss, David Zaslav, when he made it clear Marvel and Star Wars are not for sale and will remain exclusive to Disney+.
"We’ve actually been licensing content to Netflix and are going to continue to," he said. "We’re actually in discussion with them now about some opportunities, but I wouldn’t expect that we will license our core brands to them."
"Those are obviously competitive advantages for us and differentiators. Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars for instance, they are all doing very, very well on our platform and I don’t see why just to basically chase bucks we should do that when they are really really important building blocks to the current and future of our streaming business."
Is Zaslav chasing bucks? He also issued some comments on the decision yesterday (shortly before Iger made the remarks above), suggesting it's a combination of increasing revenue and trying to bring more subscribers to Max.
"In terms of some of the content that you’ve seen like DC we put those in windows, so someone might have it for three months or six months. We always have those movies and we have the complete set of all those movies," the executive explained. "We won’t do it unless the economics are significant, but in many cases it really helps us."
"People come back and then they want to see the full bouquet of DC movies and the only place to do that is with us or it enhances the quality of the DC library."
"So, overall I think we’re trying to figure out exactly how to maximize the value and we debated all the time," Zaslav concluded. "I think we’re doing a very good job, but as I mentioned there’ll be a lot that you’ll never see because it just belongs to us."
Whether the likes of Suicide Squad and Joss Whedon's cut of Justice League are going to convince Netflix subscribers to seek out more DCEU content from Max is tough to say, but from an economic standpoint, Warner Bros. Discovery is likely making a killing from letting the rival streamer host these popular superhero movies.
Who do you think has the better take on streaming? Iger or Zaslav? Let us know in the comments section.