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Paramount owned Twilight and just let the rights expire. The tiny studio that grabbed them turned a $37 million movie into a $3.3 billion franchise, then sold itself to Lionsgate in a deal where Lionsgate paid for most of it with cash already sitting in the studio's own bank account. Twilight sat in development at Paramount's MTV Films division for years. In April 2007 they let it go, and a small company called Summit picked up the rights. Summit's first five movies as a distributor had made $48.8 million combined in the US. They ran it lean. Four days before filming, Summit told director Catherine Hardwicke to cut $4 million from the budget or they'd pull the plug. She got it done for $37 million, and opening weekend brought in $69 million, more than those first five Summit movies made in their entire runs. This is where the money people come in. By early 2011 the first three movies had made about $1.8 billion. Summit's owners refinanced the company with a $750 million loan and paid out a special dividend of around $200 million. Then they went looking for a buyer while one Twilight movie was still left to release, because once that last movie came out, the studio would be a lot harder to sell. They wanted the deal done before then. Lionsgate bought it in January 2012 for $412.5 million. Only about $170 million of that was Lionsgate's own cash, new debt and stock, and the rest came out of Summit's accounts. Lionsgate also took on Summit's $500 million loan and had it paid off by October, four years early. Breaking Dawn Part 2 opened that November and made $829 million worldwide. Between that and The Hunger Games, Lionsgate crossed $1 billion at the US box office in a single year for the first time in its history. Run that back. Lionsgate put in about $170 million of its own, and the final movie alone grossed almost five times that. And the movie Netflix is calling the end of the story isn't the end of the money. Lionsgate's TV arm is making Midnight Sun with Netflix right now, an animated retelling of the first book from Edward's side, with production running through May 2027. Nineteen years after Paramount let it go, somebody is still cashing Twilight checks.

Netflix used to rent Disney's movies for about $30 million a year. Today Netflix is worth about $100 billion more than Disney. Disney spent ten years selling its biggest rival the exact movies that got people to sign up. When Netflix started streaming in 2007, it was a free add-on to the DVD plan with about 1,000 titles. The $5.99 plan got you six hours of streaming a month. A lot of Hollywood thought it was a joke. As late as 2010, the CEO of Time Warner compared Netflix taking over to the Albanian army taking over the world. So in 2008 Starz, which held the TV rights to Disney and Sony movies, let Netflix stream them for around $30 million a year. They figured it was easy money from a few people watching on laptops. Then Netflix went from 9.4 million subscribers to 23 million in three years, with Toy Story 3 and Tangled sitting right on the home screen. Starz woke up in 2011. Netflix offered about $300 million to keep the deal going, ten times what it had been paying, and Starz still said no. Its own CEO later called the original deal terrible. Disney's answer was to cut out Starz and sign with Netflix directly. In December 2012 it made Netflix the exclusive pay-TV home for every new Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm movie starting in 2016, for a reported $300 million a year. Most people covering the deal thought Disney had fleeced Netflix. Michael Pachter at Wedbush said he wouldn't be surprised if Netflix never made $100 million in profit again. The whole company was worth about $5 billion back then. Netflix made $3.66 billion in profit last quarter. That's 36 years of Pachter's "never again" number in three months. Disney kept cashing those checks for a pretty simple reason. Renting out movies you already made is mostly profit, and it shows up right away. Building your own streaming app means years of losses and a stock that gets punished for it. So Disney took the easy money, and the whole time Netflix was using those movies to buy itself time. Time to start making its own shows, starting with House of Cards in 2013, and time to get a few hundred million people in the habit of opening Netflix first. By the time Iger pulled the movies in 2017 to launch Disney+, Netflix already had more than 100 million members. Then the bill showed up. Disney lost over $11 billion on streaming by 2023 trying to win back an audience it had basically helped Netflix build. You can see all of it in the chart. $100 a month into Disney roughly doubled, and that's with Disney owning Marvel and Star Wars the whole time. Netflix stock is down about half from its June 2025 high, and it's still worth around $290 billion. Disney sits at about $190 billion. And this year Netflix lost the bidding war for Warner Bros, and Paramount paid it a $2.8 billion breakup fee on the way out. That one check would've paid for the old Starz deal for 93 years.