Photo Credit: The Daily Times

Yesterday, Hollywood got the news that Netflix is potentially in talks to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for about 72 billion dollars. For context, WBD owns some of the most influential properties in global entertainment, including Harry Potter, The Hangover, Beetlejuice, Tom & Jerry, HBO and CNN. While sources suggest that not all of these assets may fully follow the deal, the conversation alone is enough to trigger serious questions about what this could mean for Nollywood and African entertainment as a whole.

Nollywood’s recent growth has been powered largely by competition. For the first time in its history, African creators had multiple global buyers such as Netflix, Prime Video, Showmax, YouTube and strong local platforms all competing for content. That competition gave filmmakers leverage. Even when one door closed, another remained open. Budgets improved, production quality rose, and creators had options. With a potential Netflix–WBD merger, however, we are likely looking at a future where Netflix controls its own distribution, HBO’s premium ecosystem and Warner Bros.’ global studio infrastructure at the same time. That level of consolidation means the power of content begins to sit in very few hands.

The early Netflix Nigeria era felt wild and free. Budgets moved quickly, Nigerian stories traveled farther, and it genuinely felt like Nollywood was inching closer to its global potential. That mood started to shift late last year when industry stakeholders hinted at a pullback in investments into Nigerian films. Netflix disputed those claims and promised to keep investing in Nigerian stories, but the uncertainty lingers. A merger like this could bring stronger studio infrastructure, global distribution pipelines and more structured funding, but it also means access becomes more political, more relationship-based, more algorithm-driven and more strategically curated. It slowly stops being only about who has the boldest story and starts becoming about who fits the system best.

There is also the question of how our stories themselves may change. What made early Nigerian streaming films special was how raw and local they felt. The accents were real. The languages were layered. The characters were deeply Nigerian. The stories did not feel like they were trying to explain themselves to the world. With large-scale corporate oversight, this does not immediately mean cultural death, but it does signal a slow shift toward safer, more universal themes and fewer risky narrative experiments. We have seen something similar with Afrobeats’ global explosion. Africa gained massive global visibility, but in the process, some of the raw local sharpness softened. Global success came with subtle creative compromises, and film may be headed down a similar road.

Interestingly, one of the biggest silent beneficiaries of a Netflix–WBD merger might actually be African music but not for sentimental reasons. If Netflix ends up controlling both its own originals and Warner Bros.’ massive film and series catalogue, it also gains power over HBO soundtracks, trailers, documentaries and global licensing channels. At that scale, African music becomes less of a cultural curiosity and more of a strategic asset. Afrobeats already performs well on charts, travels easily on TikTok, and connects strongly with people across Europe and the United States. It offers freshness without the risk of building new stars from scratch. In that sense, African music is valuable because it is already proven, already global, and still relatively underpriced. A merger like this could quietly push Afrobeats into more rooms than African films have ever entered, turning songs into global soundtrack material woven into stories that travel across continents. 

Another factor that cannot be ignored is subscription culture in Africa and the long-standing reality that most Africans do not wait for platforms to arrive officially before accessing content. HBO Max, for instance, is still largely unavailable across most of the continent, not because there is no audience, but because Africa has never been a priority market in the distribution model. Instead, some HBO content is licensed out to regional platforms like Showmax, which offers limited access but not full ecosystem control. In the absence of official platforms, people have built their own systems through Telegram, torrents, download websites and peer sharing. Piracy continues to grow as smartphone access expands. The irony is that if Netflix buys WBD, it instantly inherits a massive African audience that already consumes HBO content without paying for it. This shifts Africa from being ignored to becoming unavoidable. To truly win the continent, Netflix would have to rethink its strategy entirely by introducing mobile-first pricing, building telco bundles, investing in consumer education and creating plans that match local spending power. This merger may not have been designed with Africa in mind, but Africa could easily become the most important place where the future of this new streaming giant is tested.

Film festivals may also begin to shift quietly in purpose. Platforms like Cannes, Sundance, Berlinale, Toronto and FESPACO may evolve further from cultural showcase spaces into strategic talent farms, corporate scouting grounds and global content pipelines. What gets celebrated may increasingly align with what platforms need to sell, not just what is culturally daring or important.

All of this could push Nigeria further toward becoming a global content factory rather than just a creative capital. That means higher production volume, faster turnaround times, lower ownership stakes and stronger export pipelines. None of these are automatically bad, but they raise a pressing question about whether we are building long-term creative ownership or merely producing on demand for global platforms.

In the end, a Netflix–Warner Bros. Discovery merger would not just reshape Hollywood. It would quietly rewrite the economic logic of African creativity by influencing who gets funded, who gets seen, who gets paid and who gets remembered. Africa remains one of the most powerful cultural forces in the world, but the next phase will test whether we step into that power as owners of our stories or simply as suppliers of content to systems far bigger than us.