Netflix acquiring Warner Bros: 83 billion reasons to wonder what happens to WB Games?

Netflix’s proposed 83 billion dollar acquisition of Warner Bros raises major questions for WB Games, its studios and top franchises. From Mortal Kombat to Hogwarts Legacy, the future of these titles may shift once the deal moves forward in 2026

Hyderabad: What does the proposed deal mean for Warner Bros owned franchises, IPs and games? Mapping the scope of the catalogue that Netflix acquires if the proposed 83 billion dollar USD deal is signed off in the third quarter of 2026 is almost unimaginable.

However, if one were to try, this would include everything from DC icons like Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman to Wizarding World franchises like Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts, and similarly from the fantasy of The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit to the cyber dystopian Matrix, all things Lego and even Godzilla, King Kong and Dune.

Acquiring AOL Time Warner was once supposed to be unimaginable. Assembled after the largest media deal worth an estimated USD 165 billion in January 2000, Warner Bros Discovery Inc is one of the largest global media corporations today, and if the proposed Netflix acquisition is to go through, the newly assembled consortium would serve 428 million subscribers globally, a number more than double the closest competitor Amazon Prime and MGM who currently cater to 205 million users.

While most media and entertainment news outlets will spend much of next year attempting to understand the many ramifications of this deal, Game On is a gaming column and our focus lies only on the game studios and franchises that are to be affected by this development.

Spokespeople from Warner Bros Discovery have confirmed that the deal includes the purchase of Warner Bros Games, a company known for developing the Batman Arkham Trilogy (Asylum, City and Knight), the Middle Earth franchise (Shadow of Mordor and War), Mortal Kombat and most recently the best-selling game of 2023 Hogwarts Legacy. In terms of game development studios, NetherRealm, Rocksteady, Avalanche, Portkey Games and TT Games are expected to join Netflix once the deal concludes. With successors to Hogwarts Legacy and Mortal Kombat currently in the works it would be fair to assume, if the deal goes through, that they would be launched by Netflix.

However, things are far from certain at the moment as blockbuster deals like this take a long time to settle. A good example is Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a deal finalised in October 2023 that has yet to see the newly formed entity work in a cohesive manner.

In the case of this deal, it would be interesting to see how WB Games lines up alongside Netflix’s own games service. The latter has been largely focused on furthering mobile experiences with 2024’s Monument Valley 3 and on extending the worlds of their first party content like Stranger Things.

Meanwhile, WB Games and its studios like Rocksteady, NetherRealm and Avalanche have shown expertise in making games at the largest possible scale, something that Netflix has no experience in.

For gamers, thus, this deal is more worrying than it is for the fan of television series like Friends and Big Bang Theory or movie franchises like Batman, Wonder Woman or Superman.

In the long run if this culminates in a newer version of the Multiversus game where you can pit Netflix’s Wednesday against Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings, yours truly will not be reviewing that game, thank you very much.