Buying Warner Bros. Gives Netflix What It's Always Needed: An Identity The $83 billion deal gives the streamer a century's worth of prestige television and movies, from Batman movies to . It also ends the streaming wars. In a deal to acquire Warner Bros. announced Friday, Netflix will be scooping up HBO's many titles, including Courtesy of HBO Close your eyes, think for a minute, and tell me: What is a Netflix Movie? OK, try again: What is a Netflix Show? Sure, it's easy to rattle off some killer titles--, --but Netflix has never really had a brand identity.

Netflix has used artificial intelligence in one of its TV shows for the first time, in a move the streaming company's boss said would make films and programmes cheaper and of better quality. Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said the Argentinian science fiction series El Eternauta (The Eternaut) was the first it had made that involved using generative AI footage. "We remain convinced that AI represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper," he told analysts on Thursday after Netflix reported its second-quarter results. He said the series, which follows survivors of a rapid and devastating toxic snowfall, involved Netflix and visual effects (VFX) artists using AI to show a building collapsing in Buenos Aires. "Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and, in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and workflows," he said.

Over the long weekend, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos got a bit of a roasting for telling the New York Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro that Barbie and Oppenheimer, whose combined global box office was 2.4 billion, "would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix." It's easy to chuckle at Sarandos' comments, as it was when Zack Snyder told Joe Rogan that his movie Rebel Moon--Part One: A Child of Fire pulled in more viewers than Greta Gerwig's theatrical smash. But as Sarandos' interview was being mocked around the internet, movie theaters were experiencing their worst Memorial Day weekend in decades, led, just barely, by an underwhelming start for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Little more than a week after the prequel to the beloved Mad Max: Fury Road debuted to awestruck reviews at Cannes, the film edged out Garfield to win the weekend with a four-day haul of 32 million at the domestic box office, which was a far less robust showing than industry experts had predicted, and well short of its predecessor's 45 million opening. Meanwhile, according to Netflix's figures, more than 28 million viewers worldwide celebrated the holiday by firing up Atlas, in which Jennifer Lopez is a scientist who defends Earth from annihilation by a terrorist artificial intelligence played by Simu Liu. Common sense, and possibly even Ted Sarandos, will tell you that people don't watch Netflix's content the way they watch a movie like Barbie in a theater--or even the way they'll watch Barbie when it turns up on Netflix.

Not all original shows can land that coveted spot on Netflix, but there are some shows that probably should have. Netflix is known for its very successful original series, like "Stranger Things," "Daredevil," "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black" – but that doesn't mean the streaming service hasn't missed out on a few major shows. Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer of Netflix, recently revealed that Netflix has passed on some shows that wound up being huge hits for competitors. "There have been many of them," Sarandos told Variety in a recent interview. While he didn't share all of the series they ended up passing on, he did share three of the big titles that came to mind. Netflix passed on "Transparent" and it ultimately went to Amazon Studios.

As a masters student exploring artificial intelligence at Stanford University almost 30 years ago, Reed Hastings no doubt had an eye on where the future might take him. But of all the scenarios he imagined for his career, it's highly unlikely that any of them included the one that unfolded this past week: strolling the red carpet in the south of France, rubbing shoulders with some of the country's most glamorous actors and actresses, and fielding questions about his role as a global media kingpin. It's a future the CEO of Netflix says he couldn't even have predicted five years ago, when the company was still primarily shipping DVDs to customers in the U.S. while grappling with its emerging video streaming service. Even now, the Internet continues to scramble the game so fast that Hastings said his company is racing to keep up with all the changes. When asked, he didn't even want to hazard a guess as to where Netflix might be five years from now. "We don't really know," Hastings said.