Earlier this week, The Independent reported that “Wednesday” might move from Netflix to Prime Video because Amazon Studios closed an $8.5 billion merger with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the studio behind the “Addams Family” spinoff. Acquisition aside, anything seems possible in this day and age where approximately 10,000 different streaming services seem to be shuffling titles between their ever-growing libraries. It wouldn’t even be the first time a series with the Netflix Original stamp jumped ship to a different streamer. But even so, this “Wednesday” scenario is pretty far-fetched.
At that time of the merger, Amazon declared that there were no plans to make all MGM content exclusive to Prime Video, and given how tied up the studio is with ongoing projects, doing so would be difficult. Thanks to the MGM acquisition, Amazon is now in business with many of its streaming rivals — “Wednesday” is just the most recent example. MGM Television produces several other ongoing properties that Amazon can’t easily get its hands on, including “The Handmaid’s Tale” for Hulu, “Last Light” for NBCUniversal’s Peacock, “Fargo” for FX, and “Vikings: Valhalla” for Netflix. On the unscripted/network TV side of things, the studio is also behind huge reality series like “The Voice” (NBC), “Shark Tank” (ABC), and “Survivor” (CBS).
The merger doesn’t mean that all of these titles will be unceremoniously pushed over to Prime Video, because streaming rights are much more complicated than that. In the case of “Wednesday,” while neither Netflix nor Amazon have commented directly, a report from IndieWire claims that the deal between Netflix and MGM for the series was locked in long before the merger, meaning there’s no need for the show to move.