When Hollywood Becomes Park of the Oligarchy, Who Really Holds the Power?

Jane Fonda did not mince words. Her warning was clear.

“Make no mistake, this is not just a catastrophic business deal that could destroy our creative industry. It is a constitutional crisis exacerbated by the administration’s demonstrated disregard for the law.” - Jane Fonda

The proposed Netflix and Warner Bros. merger sits at the intersection of art, commerce, politics, and power. It forces a larger question. Who gets to decide what stories we tell and who gets to hear them. Below are the two competing interpretations of what this moment means.

The Cultural Power Concern

This view takes Fonda’s words seriously. It argues that the merger represents more than another corporate consolidation. Streaming platforms have become the new public square. They shape how people understand the world. They curate our collective memory. They decide which truths rise and which disappear.

The fear is that two dominant platforms becoming one creates a nearly impenetrable gatekeeper. A handful of executives would control an enormous portion of the stories Americans consume. At a time when disinformation already circulates faster than facts, shrinking the number of decision makers feels dangerous.

This concern widens when placed beside an administration already showing a pattern of disregarding legal norms. Cultural control does not always come through censorship. More often, it comes through invisibility. Projects that challenge power quietly lose funding. Voices at the margins never get through the door. The country drifts into a soft authoritarianism that looks benign because it arrives dressed as business.

Those who share this view see the merger as a structural threat to the First Amendment. Not in the traditional legal sense. In the cultural sense. The sense that a democracy requires a diversity of storytellers to stay alive.

The Business Survival Argument

The other side believes Fonda’s framing is too extreme. Media consolidation is nothing new. Studios have merged and divided and merged again for decades. Antitrust regulators can intervene if the public interest is truly at risk.

Supporters of this view argue that the pressures on the entertainment industry are unlike anything we have seen before. The explosion of online creators has fractured the audience. Traditional studios have been bleeding money in the race to maintain subscriber counts. They see consolidation as a practical answer to an unstable business model. Not a takeover of culture.

This view also insists that fears of narrative control overlook the scale of the current media landscape. Anyone with a phone can build an audience. Anyone can launch a series or a channel. The pipeline has widened, not narrowed. A merger may reduce the number of major studio voices, but it cannot silence the millions of independent creators who have proven they do not need studio permission to shape culture.

Those who hold this position do not dismiss the concern. They simply believe this is an economic issue, not a constitutional one.

My Position

My view on all of this begins with something simple. A studio lives or dies on whether people choose to watch what it makes. No merger can force us to hit play. No board can make us care. The real gatekeeper is the individual viewer. If we do not match our viewing choices with our values and our politics, then the culture falls by our own hand. Not by corporate consolidation.

That is the best case scenario and I own that. It is the place where I believe change happens. It is also the place where Pollyanna sits in the front row because individuals do not always choose consciously. They choose what is easiest. They choose what is placed in front of them. They choose what the algorithm recommends. So even though the power is real, the use of that power is not guaranteed. I get that. We must be educated and vigilant in our opposition to someone else choosing what comes on our feeds, and how we evaluate it. That is why curating your own news input is critical.

There is still a truth worth naming. Individual creators have changed the landscape in ways that prove the audience can move markets. Reese Witherspoon built Hello Sunshine by bringing women’s stories to the center. She bought rights no one else valued. She produced work the industry underestimated. She built a brand grounded in a demographic that studios ignored, and she turned that into a cultural engine. When she sold Hello Sunshine for close to a billion dollars, she proved that one woman and one demographic could tilt the industry.

Shonda Rhimes did the same. She left network television for Netflix and her audience followed her without hesitation. She can leave again if she chooses. Her power does not come from the platform. It comes from the loyalty of the people who see themselves in her stories. She can leave Netflix, and will I believe, if they do not behave the way she wants to be remembered.

But the challenge sits beside the promise. Most creators do not have the access or the visibility that Reese had when she stepped in. They do not have the early win that let Shonda build an empire. When the number of buyers shrinks, the number of green lights shrinks with it. The voices at the margins get pushed further out. Risk taking disappears. The range of stories narrows and the new creators cannot get inside the room long enough to build the audience they need.

And of course, there is more. Individual choice happens inside systems that shape what we see long before we see it. Streaming platforms decide what appears on the homepage. They decide what gets promoted. They decide what gets buried. We have power, but it operates inside a structure designed to steer us. If we do not acknowledge that, then we miss the very thing that threatens culture.

So here is where I land. We are not going to be able to stop this oligarchy laid in financial future. The mergers will continue. The consolidation will accelerate. The financial model will keep pushing toward fewer decision makers. But the last line of defense is still us. If we do not choose consciously, the system wins. If we do not support the creators telling the stories that reflect our values, the stories vanish. If we do not understand that culture is shaped by our viewing patterns as much as by boardrooms, then we participate in our own silencing.

The power is real. The obstacles are real. The only path forward is to hold both at the same time. The system controls the stage. The viewer decides what plays.