Diller: “Hollywood now irrelevant”
February 20, 2019
By Chris Forrester
Barry Diller, who heads up IAC but is a former boss at Paramount and Fox Studios, says that Hollywood is now irrelevant and has been beaten by Netflix.
Diller, speaking in a podcast for the Recode-Decode website, said that the outlook for Hollywood is dire. “Netflix has won this game” he said. “I mean, short of some existential event, it is Netflix’s. No one can get, I believe, to their level of subscribers, which gives them real dominance.’
“It used to be if you could get your hands on a movie studio, you were sitting at a table with only five other people. And so that table dominated media worldwide,’ he said, “That’s over.”
He said that Hollywood used to buy up smaller challengers, but that Amazon and Netflix are already far too big for an acquisition. “’For the first time, [the studios] ain’t buying anything. Meaning they’re not buying Netflix. They are not buying Amazon.”
He also strongly hinted that he had doubts about Disney’s competitive strategy against Netflix and Amazon, saying the company would be “OK, but those who chase Netflix are fools”.