Netflix's decision to walk away from the Warner Bros. catalog left it without the deep franchise IP needed to retain subscribers in a market where 30 to 40 percent of audiences change their subscriptions every year.
Tommy Shull, Principal of STUCK IN MOTION, argues that cultural moments alone don't build platforms. Tiger King defined a moment, but it didn't build a fan base that keeps coming back.
The real competition in streaming is shifting toward the creators who can build franchise worlds at scale, and studios willing to pay for them, as NBCUniversal's billion-dollar bet on Taylor Sheridan makes clear.
Netflix is one of the best in the business at breaking through culture. Once a year, sometimes more, it produces something the whole world talks about. The problem is what happens after. The conversation ends, the subscribers who came for that show leave, and the cycle starts over. That's not a content strategy. That's a revolving door. Netflix’s failure to secure the Warner Bros. catalog in Paramount’s $111 billion bid, helped expose that structural weakness at the center of its business.
Tommy Shull has a front-row seat to how the streaming wars are actually being fought. As Principal of STUCK IN MOTION, an award-winning creative studio, he has edited for Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and U2, produced campaigns for McCann and Dentsu, and his team is currently developing content for Paramount's upfronts in partnership with Paramount Brand Studio. From that vantage point, Netflix's structural problem is hard to miss.
"Netflix has built a very, very robust brand integration team. They're really, really well set up for taking a franchise and running with it, but they don't have the thing to run with," Shull says. That gap traces directly back to the Warner Bros. bid. "It was a smart business decision, but it's ultimately bad for Netflix. Paramount made it too expensive; it was never worth that." The catalog would have delivered built-in fan bases and IP that keeps subscribers locked in, in a market where, as Shull puts it, "30 to 40% of subscribers change their subscriptions yearly." That churn is behavioral.
Here today, gone tomorrow: "Audiences follow shows, not platforms," Shull explains. He recently lived that pattern himself, canceling his Netflix account after a second price increase. "I'd already watched what I wanted." He moved to HBO to work through a backlog of deeper series. "As the IP stacked, I found a subscription that worked, and bunkered down." The irony is that Netflix is still one of the best at driving cultural moments.
Hit in one go: "At least once a year, Netflix has something that takes the whole world by storm. That's incredible, but they come and they go, and then that's it," Shull adds. He points to Tiger King as a defining example. "He 100% impacted culture and is now defined in the pandemic era forever. But what creates a franchise is a fan base that they can connect to, that breathes life and continues on beyond that single season." This is something far harder to sustain in the docu space.
Doc-makers need not apply: "You think the Duffer Brothers are going to make a doc?" Shull says of their move to Paramount. "They're looking for their next Stranger Things." That shift, from one-off hits to franchise-building, is where the market is heading. And while Netflix is preparing for that future, it doesn't yet have the content to fully support it. "House of Netflix is opening up left and right. It was designed as a modular system, rotating IP to keep the experience current." That kind of extension beyond the screen is what Disney has mastered and what Paramount has long done with franchises like PAW Patrol, turning them into revenue engines. Netflix is building toward the same model, but without the depth of IP to make it work at scale.
"You’re not going to see Baby Reindeer in the House of Netflix, you’ll see Stranger Things and K-Pop Demon Hunter. People expect Batman, Game of Thrones, and Harry Potter, but they don't have any of that," Shull emphasizes. At the same time, Netflix is also betting on production. The company recently agreed to acquire Ben Affleck’s AI firm for a reported $600 million. "Is it worth that? Would that deal have happened before the $2.8 billion breakup fee? Did that change things? I don’t know. But everyone is embracing AI and figuring out how to show up." Still, without content, neither retail nor production solves the core problem, and developing originals "take time, incubation, and isn't always successful."
The creator casino: Shull points to Stranger Things, which has spanned five seasons over nearly a decade. "That's not how franchises work; you have to be churning and burning them out," he highlights. Renting IP from studios like Sony is one option, but the bigger shift is a growing battle for the creators who can build franchises in the first place. "If you've proven you can create a franchise or a catalog of hit shows and spin-offs, there's going to be a lot of money for creators who can come in and develop something at scale." That war is already being waged.
Top of the empire: "Nothing’s a better indication of that than NBCUniversal spending a billion dollars on Taylor Sheridan," Shull notes. At Paramount, former executive Chris McCarthy was “notorious for giving Taylor Sheridan what he needed." The result: a sprawling Yellowstone universe that drew talent like Helen Mirren, Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kurt Russell. "Getting a great creator and spending a lot of money increases you chances at getting a good franchise and to bring in talent." That talent pipeline is already shaping how studios sell to advertisers. Paramount’s upfronts are built around franchise storytelling. "Paramount will lean heavily on K-Pop Demon Hunter and Stranger Things spin-offs. But Netflix would have loved to say, 'Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers,' but they can’t.”
Netflix is not short on infrastructure, ambition, or cultural reach. What it's short on is the kind of deep franchise IP that turns a subscriber into a fan and a fan into someone who never cancels. Disney built that over decades. Paramount has PAW Patrol, a sprawling Yellowstone universe, and a creator in Taylor Sheridan who keeps delivering. Netflix has a $2.8 billion breakup fee and a development pipeline that takes time. The platforms that dominate the next era of streaming will be the ones that locked in world-building creators before everyone else realized what they were worth. "You have to make these decisions when you're on top, not make these decisions when you're on the back foot," Shull concludes.
