It’s a story so good  it could have been a screenplay. In 2000, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph sat down across from John Antioco, then CEO of video rental giant Blockbuster, and pitched him on acquiring their still unprofitable DVD-by-mail startup, Netflix, which at the time had around 300,000 subscribers. But when they told him their price—$50 million and the chance to develop and run Blockbuster’s online rental business—Antioco balked. It was a famously shortsighted business decision: By 2010, Blockbuster had filed for bankruptcy, and Netflix had stormed Hollywood with its entertainment streaming service

Now Netflix—a behemoth that has moved far beyond streaming others’ films and shows, with an estimated $18 billion content spend for 2025—is writing the sequel, following the same underdog-towinner trope. It announced in early December an $82.7 billion deal to become the new owner of the storied Warner Bros. film and television studios, plus cable crown jewel HBO and streamer HBO Max. The deal comes some 15 years after an executive who previously oversaw those very assets dismissed the notion of Netflix being a threat to Hollywood’s power structures: Jeff Bewkes, then CEO of Warner Bros. parent Time Warner, described that scenario in 2010 as “a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world?” 

To be sure, Netflix has never before attempted a deal of this size. And with rival Paramount making a play for the entire Warner Bros. Discovery business through a hostile bid, a Netflix–Warner Bros. tie-up is still far from a sure thing. But even if the deal never actually materializes, Netflix has demonstrated how to not just disrupt an industry but swallow it. 

It’s a trajectory that’s all the more impressive given the company’s scrappy, dotcom-era start. “Netflix should have never existed,” says Peter Supino, who analyzes the media and entertainment industries as managing director at Wolfe Research. “Their path relied on a bunch of strategic decisions that were risky and uncertain at times and the body of which proved out to be smashingly correct.” 

To dominate streaming today, of course, is to dominate all of entertainment. And Netflix now has a market cap—almost $400 billion currently— that exceeds the combined value of legacy competitors Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox Corp., Paramount, and Lionsgate. 

So just how did Netflix do it? The company has built a culture that fosters flexibility and daring, and has repeatedly shown its adeptness at taking calculated risks—including a series of strategic U-turns. Netflix was never going to make original television shows and movies—until it ponied up an unprecedented $100 million for two seasons of from executive producer David Fincher in 2011, sight-unseen without a pilot. Netflix didn’t care about password sharing—until it began vigorously enforcing a rule in 2023. Netflix was never going to introduce livestreaming or —until it added both within a few months in 2022 and 2023, then struck its first major sports rights deal, another one-time no-go, in 2024.