NIKA DUBROVSKY    JANUARY 5, 2026

On 5 December 2025, Netflix announced it would buy Warner Bros — including the film studio, TV studio, HBO, HBO Max, and the entire DC Comics universe — for $72 billion. The deal is expected to close, despite interest from Paramount, in the third quarter of 2026.​

Everyone is talking about higher subscription fees, tighter political censorship, and monopoly. All of that matters, of course, but none of it is the main story.​

Dream Factory as political institution

From its inception, Hollywood has been, above all, a dream factory; and, precisely in this capacity it has functioned as one of the key political institutions of the twentieth century, far more significant than most parliaments or universities. This factory’s production was less about stories as about desires, habits of dreaming in a certain pattern, images of the future, of love, of freedom, of what it might mean to “really live”​.

Unlike today’s platform feudalism, early Hollywood functioned as almost the opposite of an aristocracy. It was a club of shtetl kids, small traders, circus and circus people and carnies running what was then considered to be something halfway between a sideshow and a cheap thrill. Movie theaters were treated roughly the way circuses were: migrants congregated there, workers too; people with no political voice went to the movies, and, for the first time, they were invited to imagine themselves as the protagonists.​

It is no coincidence that one of the very few genuinely popular geniuses of silent comedy, the working-class south Londoner Charlie Chaplin, was eventually officially kicked out of the self‑styled “citadel of freedom” for his subversive beliefs. States tend to understand very quickly that a factory that produces laughter can also become a factory of dangerous ideas.​

Compared with Soviet Socialist Realism this paradox is almost insulting. Censors in Moscow or Warsaw could endlessly rewrite scripts and ban “ideologically harmful” films, but when it came to manufacturing actual desires they remained minor players. Politburos and Volkskammers produced pale, over-administered versions of the “aspirations of the masses”, while the masses themselves preferred to watch Hollywood action films and sugary melodramas across the globe. It was Hollywood that calibrated the world’s desires: a brand selling imagination as a commodity, drilling to perfection plots of success, heroism, and catastrophe.​

Unlike the Soviet system, Hollywood often operated closer to the realm of magic and rarely openly impose ideology. It created procedural rituals by which human biographies were rewritten into genre formats: I’m not just living. I’m in the third act of my biopic. Hence the peculiar power of even the most formulaic teen drama: it offers a script for turning pain, awkwardness, and excessive sensitivity into a story, thus making that pain bearable.​

News of Hollywood’s impending demise therefore sounds to many of us more alarming than chatter about stock market crashes. A market crash is just a reshuffling of numbers in an abstract system; a year later, the indices may be rising again, as it is a controlled game. The collapse of an institution that, for decades, offered the planet a coherent vision of the future and a participatory dramatization of the relationship  between “desire – technology – progress” comes as a blow to the very capacity to imagine a radically different world. The technology of producing dreams may have served Western empire more reliably than aircraft carriers and missile silos.​

What Netflix is buying: total bureaucratization

Netflix, a company that started in 1997 by mailing DVDs to subscribers, now owns one of the most iconic film studios in cinema history. It controls a century of Warner Brothers films — from Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz to late‑model blockbusters, to the comic franchises Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the entire DC superhero universe. It owns the Harry Potter franchise. It owns the prestige back catalog of HBO too: Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, The Wire.​

Warner is the same studio that once offered audiences worldwide theatrical heroes saving the world on a big screen, born from a time when movies were cultural events, not algorithmically optimized binge “content”. Its characters were more than simply entertainment; they embodied ideals, dreams, and the myth of American exceptionalism.​ Now, they have been rebadged as IP assets in a streaming portfolio, evaluated in terms of retention metrics and franchise‑development potential. Expect endless sequels to sequels. Captain America 502, Part 48, Subsection 4: The Codicil War.​

How we arrived here follows a pattern. Like universities and NGOs, Hollywood was long ago pulled into a regime of totalized bureaucratization: the shift from production to finance, from experiment to compliance. In such a system the only truly rational strategy is to make pre‑tested   “sequels” and “threequels” for predictable returns, to hire actors who are easy to insure and easier to replace, and to minimize any inconvenient imaginings that cannot be quantified on a spreadsheet.​

Just as late‑Soviet nomenklatura ran cultural output through directives from above, late‑capitalist studios run the imagination itself through budgets and quarterly reports. The only fundamental difference is the letterhead: one bureaucracy used Central Committee forms, the other uses investor slide decks.​

In this respect Hollywood’s downfall does indeed resemble the death of the late-stage USSR. All decisions about what counts as “art” are made by people personally terrified of risk; the outcome is almost guaranteed: endless continuations, familiar, safe faces on screen, and the quiet extinction of surprise. Soviet officials at least openly called themselves censors. Today the flattening is attributed to disembodied “market analytics”.​

An accidental herald of multipolarity

The streaming format — liberated from theatrical “windows” and rigid broadcast schedules — created a space for the strange and unexpected. Netflix started life as a niche service with a simple promise: watch what you want, when you want.​

That niche positioning blew open doors that the old studio system held firmly shut. Suddenly, national cinemas — films and series rooted in specific languages, histories, and cultural traditions, long confined to their domestic markets and festival circuits — found global audiences.  La Casa de Papel from Spain became a worldwide phenomenon. Lupin from France charmed viewers across continents. Dark from Germany acquired a dedicated cult. Indian films such as RRR and a wave of Korean cinema reached viewers who would never have encountered them via traditional distribution.​

The centralized, Anglophone Hollywood empire built the infrastructure for its own obsolescence. Netflix’s “watch what you want” model turned out to be ahead of the curve not only in terms consumer choice, but for the geopolitical shift away from American cultural hegemony. When people are allowed to choose freely, they do not always choose American stories. Often, they choose stories that dismantle American mythology.​

Squid Game and the magic circle of debt

Which leads us to Squid Game.

The 2021 Korean series became the most-watched show in Netflix’s history. Hundreds of millions watched desperate, indebted people forced to play children’s games to the death for the amusement of bored billionaire spectators placing bets on who would survive.​

With Squid Game, director Hwang Dong‑hyuk delivered a brutal critique of late capitalism. The series metaphorizes how a neoliberal economy traps people in unpayable debts, and how the promise of meritocracy masks a rigged game, as well as how the rich turn human suffering into spectacle. The show attacks the “American dream” narrative from the vantage point of South Korea, which had embraced neoliberal reforms after its 1997 IMF crisis.​

The structural background of the series is familiar. In late capitalism almost all money is someone’s future income, pre‑captured as debt. “Freedom” is defined by the degree to which one is allowed to own a slice of one’s own future exploitation. In that sense Squid Game is not really an allegory; it’s merely a narrativization of a world where people run in circles servicing interest payments while the rules are changed behind their backs.​

Netflix’s role is not simply to commodify criticism of itself, however. The platform ultimately turns the scenario into a recurring ritual. Viewers recognize their own lives in the games of debt all while validating the rent-seeking process, by maintaining their Netflix subscriptions — one more tiny tithe into the wider system.​

This fits neatly into the neo‑feudal picture [that] Yanis Varoufakis sketches: digital platforms as new Lords of the Manor, skimming profits from other people’s labor, imagination, and reliance on platforms based on intellectual property. Netflix, like Amazon, no longer “produces” in the sense of the industrial economy. It simply builds fences around existing flows of creativity and attention, and converts these into private fiefdoms.​​

An immigrant club of fairground impresarios once made movies for workers and fellow migrants; that ecosystem has hardened into a digital manor house demanding rents on imagination itself. Critique of this circumstance has turned out to be more marketable than propaganda — and it comes from outside the American cultural core, proving that the multipolar world Netflix enabled is ready to tell very different stories.​

Now Netflix is buying the studio that created the Superman franchise, the supreme embodiment of American exceptionalism and heroic idealism. The company whose signature cultural product demolished the American dream now holds the primary franchise that existed to celebrate it.​​

Genre shift: from superheroes to debtors

Old Hollywood did not die solely from monopolistic mergers — though Marx would have reminded us that monopoly is the soul and natural endpoint of capitalism. In this case, monopoly plus political censorship (far from unknown in Hollywood) became the precondition for a change of genre.​

The epic universalism of the superhero — Captain America saves the world, Superman defends truth, justice, and the American way — has shattered into a kaleidoscope of local story‑streams. Streaming then ruthlessly separated the “mainstream” from everything else.​

Netflix’s acquisition strategy makes this rupture obvious: it buys mainstream-branded content, evergreen retro‑American franchises such as Captain America and exhausted IPs that have had their souls bled out through repetition. Managers plan to monetize these dried husks, squeezing out sequel after sequel.​​

Meanwhile, the real creative energy — the stories that actually seize the global imagination — comes from elsewhere. From Korean dramas about the violence of capitalism, from Spanish heists, from German time‑travel puzzles, and beyond. The universal superhero who saves everyone has been replaced by specific stories from specific places that somehow resonate universally because they speak honestly about power, suffering, and survival.​

Squid Game, therefore, is not just Netflix’s biggest hit; it is an obituary, and not only for Netflix’s own business model (which involves selling critique while embodying that which is being critiqued). It is also an obituary for Captain America, and for the United States.​

The end of a regime of imagination

One epochal systemic shift already took place in the 1970s: investment and technological imagination were consciously redirected from material space to informational space. Instead of flying cars and Mars bases we got interfaces, corporate reports, access codes, and an endless stream of series designed to persuade us we already live in the age of unprecedented technological wonder.​

The “death of Hollywood” is the formal acknowledgment that the dream factory is no longer a strategic sector. This is more significant than any crash in share prices, because it is not just another loop in the capital cycle; it signals a shift in the regime of the imagination. Where there was once a centralized machinery for generating stories, there remains a vast bureaucratic apparatus for managing data, credit, and security. The future ceases to be a stage to step onto and becomes a corridor where the only action available is filling out forms and awaiting algorithmic verdicts.​

The next step in the process is already under way: now, even centralized dream production becomes superfluous. It is more profitable to keep people in a state of fractured attention, perpetually oscillating between short clips, workplace interfaces, and debt obligations.​

Squid Game is not just Netflix’s biggest hit; it is an obituary for a specific vision of America—the hero who rescues the world, the nation that spreads freedom. But that vision was already dying long before a Korean series replaced it on the balance sheet. The dream factory had stopped producing dreams decades earlier.

Auctioning off the props

The figures tell the story: $72 billion in stock consideration, $82.7 billion in enterprise value, regulatory approvals pending, unions protesting, movie theater owners horrified. Paramount reportedly floated a $108 billion rival bid. Comcast also tried to get in. Netflix won.​

The underlying story is simpler. The most successful critique of capitalism in popular culture has come from within the machine. Netflix demonstrated that you can sell people explanations of their own exploitation, and they will pay for the privilege on a monthly basis.​

So perhaps we are not at a funeral so much as at a prop auction after an overlong show. The question is who will drag these costumes offstage, and for what future performance. A larger question remains, however:

Is there any collective capacity left to imagine something that is not a spectacle at all, but something altogether different?”

Nika Dubrovsky is an artist and writer. She is the founder of the David Graeber Institute and the editor of Graeber books.

First published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.