Who Will Buy Our Work? The Netflix–Warner Tie-Up and the Future of Hollywood’s Workforce

When a single buyer grows so large that creators, crews, and independent producers must come to it to survive, the labor market changes as surely as the skyline changes when a new tower appears. A recent warning from a former Amazon Studios boss has crystallized a fear many in the industry have been nursing: if Netflix and Warner Bros. come together under one roof, they will not only remap the distribution landscape — they could also create a monopsony, concentrating buyer power and reshaping how work is valued, allocated, and compensated across Hollywood.

What a monopsony would mean for work

Monopsony is the flip side of monopoly. Instead of one firm dominating sales to consumers, a monopsonist dominates purchases from suppliers. In cultural industries that means the merged company becomes the primary buyer of scripts, shows, production services, and talent. Buyers set prices, terms, and rhythms. When there are many buyers, sellers can play them off one another. When buyers are few, sellers lose leverage.

For the people who actually make content, that loss of leverage is not abstract. It shows up in contract clauses, in the absence or presence of residuals, in the duration of employment, and in the ability to negotiate fair pay. It shows up in the kinds of projects that are greenlit, in which voices get amplified, and in the career arcs young professionals can expect.

Fewer buyers, higher risk for workers

In practice, consolidation can produce immediate and cascading effects across the workforce:

• Compression of wages and fees: When a small set of large buyers determines commissioning budgets, negotiating power shifts. For freelancers and smaller production companies, the result can be stagnating fees, more demanding buyout clauses, and fewer opportunities to leverage competing offers.
• Precarity of roles: Hiring patterns may shift toward project-based engagements and away from stable, in-house staff. Centralized decision-making can concentrate commissioning in a handful of teams, leaving entire talent pools underutilized.
• Homogenization of assignments: A dominant buyer optimizes for scale and data-backed predictability. Riskier, experimental, or niche projects that incubate new talent may be sidelined, reducing the variety of work available to crews and creatives.
• Weaker unions and bargaining leverage: Collective bargaining relies on alternative employment opportunities. Fewer buyers can blunt unions’ leverage, as workers face a narrower set of employers to approach for jobs.

Why competition in marketplaces matters for work

Markets are not just about end consumers and price tags; they are also ecosystems that govern career pathways, institutional memory, and the informal networks that get people their first and next jobs. A healthy marketplace distributes not only capital but also opportunity. When buyer power concentrates, that distribution becomes brittle.

Consider the regional production hubs that have blossomed outside Los Angeles and New York. They grew because multiple studios and streamers sought diverse locales and labor pools. A single dominant buyer could centralize production decisions, cancel projects that supported a local hiring surge, and constrict the pathways that allow technicians, assistants, and junior writers to gain the credits they need to build careers.

Not all consolidation is bad — but stewardship matters

Scale brings some benefits. Bigger companies can finance higher-budget work, invest in global distribution, and absorb risk that smaller firms cannot. They can also offer steadier work for some employees and create platforms that make discovery easier for audiences.

The danger is not scale per se; it is unchecked scale that leads to unilateral control over how creative labor is bought, priced, and managed. If left unbalanced, that control can erode the market signals that reward experimentation, fairness, and long-term investment in people.

Practical implications for the workforce

For everyone who earns a living making or supporting media, the emergence of a dominant buyer means rethinking how to build resilient careers. That can include:

• Diversify income streams: Direct-to-audience sales, branded content, international co-productions, teaching, and consulting can reduce dependence on a single commissioning entity.
• Own or retain IP where possible: Rights and ownership create leverage and residual value. Creators who can monetize their work beyond an initial commission are less vulnerable to commissioning squeezes.
• Invest in transferable skills: Technical competencies, project management, and digital distribution know-how increase mobility across sectors and platforms.
• Strengthen collective bargaining: Joining or supporting unions and guilds can help protect standards and negotiate industrywide minimums and transparent terms.
• Build direct relationships with audiences: Creators who cultivate their own followings have bargaining power independent of any single buyer.

What industry leaders and buyers can do differently

Buyers that wish to be stewards of a healthy creative economy can take deliberate steps to mitigate the negative effects of concentration. Those actions include:

• Transparent procurement and commissioning practices that publish standard deal terms and protections for freelancers and vendors.
• Upholding windows and rights splits that allow secondary markets and smaller platforms to thrive, preserving routes to market beyond the dominant buyer.
• Investing in local production ecosystems and talent development, acknowledging that short-term efficiencies should not hollow out the talent pipeline.
• Creating guarantee funds or industrywide minimums for residuals and profit participation that protect creative incomes in periods of rapid change.

Policy and the public interest

Antitrust scrutiny historically prioritized consumer prices. But where creative labor markets are concerned, paying attention to worker leverage and market access is equally important. Regulators and policymakers can update frameworks in ways that center labor outcomes:

• Evaluate mergers for their likely impact on supplier markets and labor mobility, not just final price effects for viewers.
• Consider structural remedies that preserve multiple independent commissioning sources, such as divestitures of production or distribution units that ensure continued competition.
• Promote transparency mandates that require buyers to disclose commissioning data, rates, and content spend by region and category, enabling more informed bargaining and public accountability.
• Support programs that seed alternative distribution networks and public-interest media that provide steady demand for a diverse set of creators and workers.

Creativity, resilience, and shared stewardship

At its best, the entertainment industry is an ecosystem where risk is pooled, talent is discovered, and careers are forged through a mix of serendipity and structure. When buyer power centralizes, it narrows the avenues through which that ecosystem renews itself.

The response cannot be nostalgia for an era that already had its own forms of gatekeeping. It must be forward-looking: building new institutions, norms, and policies that keep markets vibrant and fair. That means creators securing ownership where possible, workers organizing and diversifying, companies choosing stewardship over short-term dominance, and policymakers widening the lenses they use to evaluate mergers.

Final thought

Economies of scale can produce world-class shows and global audiences. But scale without checks becomes scale over the workforce that makes those shows possible. The question facing Hollywood and anyone whose work depends on creative marketplaces is not whether consolidation will happen — it already is — but how the industry will choose to balance power. Will it preserve the pathways that let a production assistant become a showrunner, an independent producer secure a series order, or a technician build a steady career? Or will one large buyer define the terms of work for everyone else?

Answering that question will determine not only what appears on screens, but how fulfilling and sustainable a career in this industry can be. That reality should inspire both vigilance and innovation: vigilance to guard against abusive concentration, and innovation to create new channels, protections, and partnerships that keep work in creative industries prosperous and fair.