Picture Credits: Warner Bros. Television
The acquisition is moving forward, and for Netflix subscribers, the benefits are seemingly arriving early. Warner Bros. Television has officially opened the licensing floodgates despite the deal not expected to be done until next year. Heavy hitters from the WB Television archives (both old and new) are crossing the aisle in droves, suggesting that as the corporate machinery gears up for a merger, Netflix is already providing a home to these shows.
When exactly the deal for all these new series this latest licensing wave has seen join Netflix is unclear. We, along with other Netflix trackers, began noticing an uptick in the number of pages for these shows that became active (i.e., not redirecting to the homepage) beginning in November 2025. Netflix declined to comment and generally does not provide details on licensed pickups.
While this trend with Warner Bros. Television is certainly interesting, given the ongoing acquisition since the December announcement, it’s a trend we’ve seen across the board with all distributors in recent years. While we saw a massive pullback in licensing during the height of the so-called “Streaming Wars,” as distributors held back their titles for exclusivity, strategies in this arena have reversed course and arguably, Netflix’s library over the past few years has been stronger than even in those heydays of when Netflix first launched and appeared (emphasis on this term!) to have everything.
Warner Bros. Television Shows Added to Netflix US
In the US, 2025 alone was pretty busy for WBTV pickups, with the following series added:
- Animal Kingdom
- Blindspot
- Castle Rock
- How to Make It in America (HBO Original)
- Mom
- The Closer
- The West Wing
That then continued into 2026, starting the arrival of the recently canceled NBC series Found at the start of the year and DC’s Teen Titans. That’s in addition to pickups The Lying Game, Rizzoli & Isles, Southland, Veronica Mars, Prodigal Son, The Following, and 11.22.63.
Some more heavy hitters are on the schedule for February 2026:
- Suburgatory
- Night Court
- Search Party
- What I Like About You
And no doubt many more in the months to come.
International Additions
Picture Credit: Warner Bros. Television
For those outside the United States, the haul is just as extensive. In addition to the titles above, Netflix has secured rights to a trove of WB procedural and sitcom classics, likely because US rights for many of these are currently locked up elsewhere.
The following titles are being prepared for international regions:
- Smallville
- 2 Broke Girls
- The Vampire Diaries
- Supernatural
- Bones
- ER
- Everwood
- The Amazing World of Gumball
- Rick and Morty (Re-upped license)
Why this major licensing spree with Warner Bros. Television? There’s no public reason right now, nor do we know exactly when all of these events were struck, but there are multiple reasons why Netflix likes licensing and why others license.
For Netflix, their number 1 metric is engagement. They’re an entertainment and tech company, but they live and die by engagement. Most of Warner Bros. Television’s library is all known IP and likely to get eyeballs, and in the case of many long-running shows, will get eyeballs for tens of hours if some start from the beginning to the end. Also speculating, this is now giving Netflix extra data on which shows from the distributor work and which ones don’t, for if and when the studio sits under their banner.
For the distributors, this is a good chance to get extra cash for the balance sheet and perhaps squeeze more money out of titles that aren’t doing so well on their own platforms, in Warner Bros. case, HBO Max. We’re not seeing HBO’s hottest shows land; rather, we’re seeing older titles that just weren’t performing or newer ones that, if they did well on Netflix, could be renewed like Manifest was back in the day (albeit the likelihood of it happening is relatively low).
That sentiment was echoed in an article by veteran Lesley Goldberg of The Ankler, who wrote about the uptick in licensing and cites a source stating that studios are licensing to Netflix to “expose the titles to a larger audience and, in some cases, give them a second life.”
We should also note that the majority of these shows have been licensed, we’re told, on a single-year basis.
It’s not just Warner Bros. that is licensing a bunch to Netflix, either. As announced during the Q4 2025 earnings, Netflix is set to license at least 20 shows from Paramount in the near future, in addition to continued pickups from AMC as part of their refreshed August 2025 deal. MGM Television is next, plus we’ve also seen Disney license over the past few years, again, with the likes of Scandal and Solar Opposites dropping recently, plus many other smaller pickups from distributors around the globe and country-specific licensing in international regions (such as ITV and BBC pickups in the UK).
In fact, let’s put some numbers on it. In 2025, Netflix added over 750 series, totaling over 11,500 episodes. Of those 11,500, just over 8,000 over those (close to 70%) are licensed TV episodes. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that Netflix Originals feature lower episode counts than licensed series of yesteryear and that Netflix gets licensed series in bulk, but it still represents a significant amount of the runtime added to the Netflix library, which now sits at close to 8,000 individual titles.
This licensing uptick extends to movies, too. MGM movies have begun hitting Netflix in the United States for the first time in years, and following their acquisition by Amazon, the James Bond movie collection is the most notable of the movies added thus far, although The Addams Family, Licorice Pizza, and many more have been added in the US and beyond. Netflix now has first-window deals with Universal and Sony in the US, plus licenses from nearly everyone, including the previous holdout, 20th Century Fox. The only major holdout now seems to be “core” Disney.
Even smaller distributors like A24 movies have been regularly trickling on and off Netflix US for the past couple of years, too. Plus, we regularly see titles from NEON and Bleecker Street added, plus SVOD premieres and licensing for the indie label Vertical.
We’ll, of course, keep tracking all the licensed pickups coming up through our Netflix News section, and we also track everything new and coming soon through our respective sections.
