Were the 2026 Oscars a Swan Song for Warner Bros.?
Stop me if you’ve seen this one. A familiar face shows up at the door wearing an uncanny smile. You warily let him in. He’s acting mostly like himself, if a little colder, until he sinks his fangs into your neck: Ahhh! You convulse, blood spurting, as you’re transformed into a soulless replica of yourself.
That may sound reminiscent of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” which was nominated for a record-breaking sixteen nominations at Sunday’s Oscars. But it also roughly describes what’s been happening in Hollywood, where one studio after another has been sucked into a conglomerated hive of the undead. (Recall Kevin O’Leary’s unhinged “I’m a vampire” speech near the end of “Marty Supreme,” in which a rapacious capitalist reminds the titular young striver that he has been around forever.) For much of the ninety-eighth Academy Awards, two films ran side by side for the gold: “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” both original movies that became box-office crowd-pleasers, with big, messy ideas about America, race, and the intrusion of the past upon the present. Both pointed to the bright future of Hollywood cinema, and both were put out by Warner Bros., a studio that showered resources on two beloved auteurs and was set up for a win-win night at the Oscars. Whichever movie came out ahead—and both did well—it was going to be a triumph for Warner Bros.
Or was it? For months, a lose-lose situation has engulfed the debt-saddled studio, which has been fought over like a prized ham by two potential buyers, Netflix and Paramount. Which smiling caller to invite in? For a while, Netflix had the edge, signalling the ultimate takeover of legacy Hollywood by the streaming revolution. But then, last month, Paramount staged a hostile comeback and sent its rival packing (not without a handsome termination fee), with the likely result that two of Hollywood’s most storied studios would merge into one. Only Paramount isn’t quite Paramount anymore; it’s the vampirized Paramount Skydance, run by David Ellison, Hollywood’s acquisitive new boy king and the son of the Trump-aligned billionaire Larry Ellison.
All this was on my mind as I emerged from the Dolby Theatre on Sunday night—having just watched “One Battle” win six Oscars, including Best Picture—and rode the escalator up to the Governors Ball. It was my eighth time at the ceremony, and I saw the familiar sights, including a server passing around Oscar-shaped salmon hors d’œuvres and the engraving stand where newly minted winners get their statuettes personalized. Near the Warner Bros. tables, cameras flashed on Ryan Coogler, the writer and director of “Sinners,” who had won Best Original Screenplay. But the company’s victory lap felt, at times, like an Irish wake: the century-old studio that had dominated the night was about to transform into God knows what.
I asked a guy who had worked on one of Warners’ nominated films what he thought of the whole paradoxical situation. “I’ll be direct,” he said. “It’s fucked.”
I began my Oscars adventure with one of the “Sinners” nominees: Ruth E. Carter, who was up for Best Costume Design. Just after noon, I showed up at her house in Beverly Hills, which was bustling with people. Carter was in her living room, where her two Oscars—for “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”—stood proud on a coffee table. The walls were decorated with Dogon masks that Carter had bought and restored for “Black Panther,” and a paper replica of the coat she’d made for Oprah Winfrey to wear in “Selma.” She showed off her look for the night: a bust with white tribal beads, repurposed from a dress she’d worn to the 2023 after-parties, combined with a black skirt, plus a white satin-silk cape and shimmering platform heels with jewelled snake heads. “The designer of this look is two-time-Oscar-winning, five-time-nominated costume designer Ruth Carter,” she said with a laugh. “I wanted it to look cultural but elegant, formal but ethnic. Don’t use that word—you know what I’m saying.”
“It’s honoring the African diaspora,” an associate chimed in.
“There you go!” Carter said. “It’s Afrofuture.”
Her dining-room table was strewn with shoes and jewelry, and she was still working out the accessories. She tried on a chunky bracelet shaped like a growling leopard and showed it to her friend Ernesto Martinez, the costumer of “Song Sung Blue.” “Too much,” he advised her.
Out on the back deck, Carter posed in front of a white backdrop for her team of videographers and photographers. “I’m so comfortable!” she said. “I mean, it took five nominations to get here.” Her partner, Larry Steele, came down the stairs in a tux, and Carter straightened his bow tie. Steele gathered everyone—fourteen people in all—and they held hands as he led a prayer. “Tonight is all about Ruth E. Carter,” he said. “So we want to say thank you for her grace and her mercy that she has bestowed on each and every one of us. May that saying give her travelling grace to and from the Oscars, and let her know that we love her, we trust her, and we hope everything goes the way she has planned.”
The couple got into a Warner Bros.-issued Suburban. “Larry, do you have my speech?” Carter called out. (It would remain unread; she lost to Kate Hawley, for “Frankenstein.”) Her first film was Spike Lee’s “School Daze,” in 1988, and five years later she got her first Oscar nomination, for Lee’s “Malcolm X.” “Denzel and I were both nominated,” she recalled in the car. “I remember sitting next to Eiko Ishioka, who won for ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ and her mother, who had a traditional Japanese costume on.” She was nominated again in 1998, for Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad.” “There wasn’t a party or anything after for us. So it felt like the loneliest Oscar nomination that I’ve ever gotten.” That year, she wore a red Richard Tyler gown with a padded silk shawl. “It was beautiful. I still have it. That was the year ‘Titanic’ sank all of our boats.”
Carter’s first win came in 2019, for “Black Panther,” her first feature collaboration with Coogler—“I was kind of shot out of a cannon,” she said—and her second arrived four years later, for “Wakanda Forever,” just days after her mother died, at a hundred and one. Her “Sinners” nomination had made her the most nominated Black woman in Oscars history. “I feel like I’m a veteran,” she said. “Sinners” had felt intimate and communal, she said, almost like an indie film compared with the “Black Panther” movies. Awards season had ballooned since the early nineties. “There wasn’t all of this fanfare,” she continued. “We didn’t have panels and talks. I don’t think people asked me much about putting the costumes together for ‘Malcolm X.’ I’m asked more about ‘Malcolm X’ now than I was then.”
The car lurched toward the red carpet, and Carter passed around gum. “No gum on the carpet,” her publicist warned from the back seat. “It’s in writing.” Rounding a corner, we saw an annual staple: religious street protesters with signs that read “TRUST JESUS” and “GOD HATES SIN.” (His position on “Sinners” was yet to be determined.) Bomb-sniffing dogs checked out the car—standard procedure, but this year the Academy had beefed up security after the F.B.I. alerted state officials to unverified bomb threats, purportedly from Iran. “I feel cool, calm, and collected, which is new to this year,” Carter told me. The car door opened, and she emerged. A voice on the loudspeaker announced, “Ruth E. Carter has arrived.”
I split with Carter and her crew on the red carpet and walked through a corridor swathed in gold curtains and lined with fake Japanese maples. A peek behind the regalia and you could see a Sephora and a Ben & Jerry’s, because, oh, right, the Oscars take place at a mall. Near the Glambot—a robotic camera that looks like it escaped from “The Matrix”—I met Michella Rivera-Gravage and Karim Ahmad, a married couple and two of the executive producers of the nominated Tunisian-French film “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” One of its actors, Motaz Malhees, a citizen of Palestine, couldn’t get a visa to attend because of President Trump’s travel restrictions. Where was he watching from? “That’s a good question,” Ahmad said. “I think he’s in the West Bank.”
The collision of the real world and the fantasyland of the Oscars continued when I met Tracii Wesley, the operations and security manager at an abortion clinic in Atlanta, and the subject of the nominated documentary short “The Devil Is Busy.” “It’s kind of a day in the life of what happened after Roe v. Wade was overturned,” Wesley said, describing how her workplace is besieged by protesters. “There are a lot of patients that we don’t get to see.” She’d noticed the “GOD HATES SIN” demonstrators on her way in, an eerily familiar presence. “You have to wonder where they’re coming from,” Wesley said. “There’s a judgment that comes with that, and that’s what I deal with when I’m at work. I always say, ‘God loves everybody, right?’ ”
I spun around: there was Jessie Buckley, the soon-to-be Best Actress for her role in “Hamnet,” telling someone how she just wanted to take the moment in; Spike Lee, in a purple fedora; Conan O’Brien, towering above it all. It was eighty-four degrees, and the stars were shvitzy. The Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, sweating in his brown-velvet suit, had just done the Glambot. “I just know that I am damp,” he said. Not far behind us was David Sedaris, who was there as a guest of The New Yorker, which had two nominated shorts in the running, “Retirement Plan” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” (“Saliva” won in a tie, with “The Singers.”) Sedaris, an Oscars first-timer, had a tiny notebook in which he was writing down names of all the famous people he saw, like a birder: Rose Byrne, Sissy Spacek, Joel Edgerton. “I’ve been keeping a list since 1988,” he said. (Seeing them onstage doesn’t count, he clarified.) “I only saw two ICE pins. I thought everyone would have one, but I think the war kind of got in the way of that,” he observed. I told him that Kieran Culkin was right behind him, and he mouthed, “Thank you!” and wrote down “Kieran Culkin.”
After he walked off, I told Culkin he’d wound up in Sedaris’s book. “He knows who the hell I am? ” Culkin said, incredulous. “Fuck, I love him! Point him out to me next time so I can write his name down.”
Leading up to the ceremony, there had been something of a surge for “Sinners,” to the point that some prognosticators were tipping it for an upset Best Picture win over “One Battle After Another.” It certainly felt that way in the room: whenever a “One Battle” nominee was read out, the crowd would applaud respectfully, but then break out into enthused cheering at any mention of “Sinners.” Nonetheless, for the first hour or so, “Sinners” kept losing awards: Best Costume Design (sorry, Ruth), Best Casting, Best Supporting Actor. Ben Fritz, an entertainment-business reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who was sitting next to me, also noticed the disconnect between the lovefest in the room and the voting results—maybe the “Sinners” wave had crested too late. Either way, Warner Bros. was sure to make it out on top. Winners were thanking “Mike and Pam”—Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, the heads of the studio’s film division—but their boss, David Zaslav, the outgoing C.E.O. and president of Warner Bros. Discovery, known for shelving films for tax writeoffs and collecting millions of dollars along the way, was going noticeably unmentioned.
I asked Fritz what he made of the Warner Bros. situation. “Zaslav hired two people to run his movie studio who were going to bet on auteur filmmakers, which is a great way to make your mark, but it doesn’t actually solve the problem of Warner Bros.’ fundamental financial problems,” he said. He wondered whether producing award-worthy films had been one way of making the studio a “very shiny object to acquire.” “Winning Oscars is great, and ‘Sinners’ made money, but, fundamentally, Warner Bros. has been poorly managed and laden with more and more debt for ten years,” he went on. “So, it’s nice to win the Oscars, but the economics speak loud and clear. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy—are they still going to have jobs in a year? Who knows. But, if they do, they’re going to be a subsidiary of Paramount. If Warner Bros. has to go out, this is a good way to go out.”
Before we could sink even further into cynicism, the wristbands Velcroed to the back of our seats started blinking, and it was time for the human performers behind the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters” to rock us out to “Golden.” “Sinners” bounced back toward the end of the night—it won four Oscars in all, including for Michael B. Jordan, whose Best Actor speech was the ceremony’s emotional high point. But Best Picture went to “One Battle,” which had been considered a front-runner since last fall, and Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress, for “Weapons,” another Warner Bros. movie.
At the Governors Ball, where the audience was celebrating over caviar, champagne, and Oscar-shaped chocolate lollipops, I sensed anxiety under the gold-plated jubilation, so I asked a few partygoers to share their anonymous thoughts on the merger-mad movie business. “I’ve been in the industry for thirty-two years. I’m not happy where it is,” a nominee in a crafts category said. “It’s all conglomerates. It’s all trying to be the biggest, and to own the most content that they can own, to make the most profit. We’re not making films anymore to rouse the public, to make the public think.” Despite just having been nominated for an Oscar, he went on, “Work’s been really scarce. I’ve never had more than two months off in thirty-two years. All of last year, I couldn’t get a job. They’re going overseas. A.I. is a big battle. It’s all crap on Amazon and Netflix and any platform that you look at.”
An agent by the chocolate-lollipop stand was more optimistic, based on the success of “One Battle,” “Sinners,” and “Weapons.” “They were all original movies. They were all risky movies when they were bought,” he said. “Here we are a year later, and these are the movies that have basically won every Oscar.” His friend, an entertainment attorney, was similarly hopeful. “I feel very bullish about the movie business right now,” he said. “Not necessarily the commercial prospects, although I think those will eventually take care of themselves. But the movies that are getting made, the movies that are in the conversation are not superhero movies, and they’re not bad sequels to movies that were original.” The attorney was one of a few people I spoke to who wished that Netflix had won the bidding war: “I think Warners would have had more of a chance to remain what it is within the umbrella of the bigger company,” he said. A programming executive told me that the streaming giant and the legacy studio could have had a “nice marriage.” “But two legacy studios merging into one—it’s really going to cannibalize the business,” he said.
An industry veteran who had worked on a Warner Bros. nominee (and a self-described “drunk-ass motherfucker”) said, of the studio, “At that level of leverage, they’re going to have to chop the shit out that place.” He sighed. “I’m doing a Warners movie right now. We just started prep, so we’re going to have ringside seats to all the chaos. I mean, for Warners to have this insane year with a historic level of nominations, historic level of box office, and then it’s, like, ‘Fuck ’em. We’re selling it.’ They had a Warners party two nights ago. Zaslav’s up there talking about how ‘Oh, my God, the studio’s back!’ I’m, like, you are pillaging this fucking thing, dude. Your top five executives are going to make a billion dollars in compensation with the sale, and they’re going to cut at least six thousand jobs. And that’s just getting started.” The real winner, he mused, was Netflix, which walked away with a nearly three-billion-dollar breakup fee for not buying Warner Bros. “And what will probably happen is they’ll probably end up selling the Warners lot to Netflix anyway, because they’ve got to get the thing off the books and make some money. Anyway. Not to be negative.” His friend nudged him. They were off to the Warner Bros. victory party. ♦