Last week, Netflix put forth an $82 million deal to purchase Warner Bros. Studios, one of the biggest movie and TV studios in the world. Warner Bros. also has a considerable place in the video game industry with franchises like Batman, Harry Potter, and Mortal Kombat under its domain. However, one Netflix executive has now acknowledged that Warner Bros.’ gaming division wasn’t a significant factor in considering its bid.
During a Netflix conference call about the potential WB sale, co-CEO Gregory K. Peters expressed some eagerness to exploit the video game franchises under Warner Bros. in the future. But he added that the games were “relatively minor” in the company’s initial plans and that it may be “worth going back again to sort of how we thought about the deal and building our valuation model.”
“While they definitely have been doing some great work in the game space, we actually didn’t attribute any value to that from the get-go because they’re relatively minor compared to the grand scheme of things,” continued Peters. “Now we are super excited because some of those properties that they’ve built–[Hogwarts Legacy] is a great example of that–have been done quite well, and we think that we can incorporate that into what we’re offering. They’ve got great studios and great folks working there. So we think that there’s definitely an opportunity there. But just to be clear, we haven’t built that into our deal model.”
At one point, Netflix seemed poised for a bigger role in the gaming industry before it canceled a AAA multiplayer shooter and closed down the studio. Netflix also shut down Boss Fight–the studio behind Netflix’s Squid Game: Unleashed mobile game.
The deal between Netflix and Warner Bros. isn’t guaranteed to go through, both because of regulatory challenges and a hostile competing bid from Paramount that raised the price of the company to over $100 billion.
