What Q4 2025 Earnings Tell Us About Production

Author: Jack Rogers, Director of Data Science and Business Intelligence, Sohonet

Earnings for the October to December 2025 quarter are now in across the eight studios that drive most premium scripted production: Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount/Skydance, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Sony Pictures.

Taken together, they describe an industry whose financial model has finished one transition and started another.

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Streaming has become a real business

The clearest signal across Q4 2025 is that the direct-to-consumer streaming model has crossed from strategic loss-leader to profit centre at four of the eight companies covered here.

Disney entertainment streaming operating income rose 72% year on year to $450M, an 8.4% margin on $5.35B of revenue.1 Warner Bros. Discovery reported full-year streaming Adjusted EBITDA of $1.37B, more than double the prior year, with management guiding to a 150M-subscriber target for Max.2 Paramount/Skydance swung its full-year DTC segment from a loss of $497M in 2024 to a profit of $230M in 2025.3 Netflix recorded a 24.5% operating margin on $12.05B of revenue.4

Apple TV+, Peacock and Prime Video do not break out comparable segment economics, so the picture is incomplete. But for the four operators that do disclose, Q4 marks the point at which streaming stopped consuming capital and started returning it. Content investment from those operators will now be judged against a profit hurdle rather than a market-share one.

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The linear cushion is thinning

The cashflow source that funded most of the streaming build-out is shrinking. Comcast’s Media segment swung from $298M of EBITDA in Q4 2024 to a $122M loss in Q4 2025, with NBA rights costs flagged as a primary driver.6 WBD’s Networks revenue fell another 6%.2 Disney’s Entertainment segment operating income dropped 35%, with linear and content licensing the principal drags despite the streaming improvement.1 Sony’s TV Productions segment fell 10%.8

The arithmetic that allowed legacy media companies to internally fund the streaming transition out of declining-but-still-large linear cashflow is closer to running out than it was a year ago. The streaming P&Ls now have to stand more on their own.

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The content-spend gap is widening

Netflix spent $17.1B on content in 2025 and guided to a 2026 revenue range of $50.7B to $51.7B, with full-year advertising revenue projected to roughly double to $3B.4 The gap between Netflix’s content investment and the next tier of streamers is widening.

Other operators are responding in different ways. Paramount/Skydance committed to an additional $1.5B in 2026 content spend on top of a $3B cost-savings target.3 WBD added roughly 14.7M Max subscribers year on year, the bulk of them international.2 Apple disclosed no content-spend figure but recorded 14% Services growth, with Apple TV+ a small piece of a $30B-plus quarterly Services business.5

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The biggest capex story of the quarter was not content

Amazon’s most significant disclosure in Q4 was a 2026 capital expenditure guide of around $200B, the overwhelming majority earmarked for AI infrastructure rather than studio production.7 Prime Video revenue and content spend remain undisclosed. For comparison, Netflix’s full-year content spend was $17.1B;4 Amazon plans to spend more than ten times that in a single year on compute and data centres.

How and whether that infrastructure spend translates into film and TV production economics is not visible in any of the eight studios’ filings. It is a 2026 question.

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Where the parks businesses still exist, they are doing the heavy lifting

Comcast’s Theme Parks segment grew 22% in Q4 2025 to $2.89B, with EBITDA exceeding $1B in a quarter for the first time, driven by Epic Universe.6 Disney’s Experiences division continues to outperform its Entertainment division.1 For the two operators with material parks businesses, live experiences are now the most reliable line of growth on the income statement and a meaningful hedge against streaming margin pressure. The pure-play streamers do not have this option.

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A note on what is driving these numbers

Q4 profitability is partly a story of cost discipline rather than expansion. Most of the eight companies have, over the last 18 months, written down content libraries, cancelled in-progress series, exited unprofitable international markets and reduced commissioning volume. Aggregate scripted production volume across the major operators has contracted from the 2022–23 peak by most external measures.

Margin expansion on a smaller base is not the same as growth, and quarterly filings do not, by themselves, distinguish between the two. The streaming-segment numbers above should be read with that in mind.

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What earnings cannot tell us

Earnings releases describe the destination of capital. They do not describe how, where, or by whom that capital is being put to work. Production volume, location, format and ownership all sit downstream of the P&L, and they are what determine the actual shape of the industry the financials are describing. The SPI is one attempt to track that downstream layer.

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What this all adds up to

Three things are now visible in the Q4 data. Streaming has crossed into profit at the operators that disclose comparable economics. The linear cashflow that funded the streaming build-out is thinning. And the largest single capital commitment in the sector, Amazon’s roughly $200B 2026 capex guide, is going to AI compute rather than to content.

The harder question, what all of this means for production volumes, slate composition and where projects actually film, is one the financials cannot answer on their own.

See Sohonet's Screen Production Index (SPI) for global production forecasts

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References

1. The Walt Disney Company, Q1 FY2026 Earnings (8-K filing and earnings release, quarter ended 28 December 2025).
2. Warner Bros. Discovery, Q4 and Full-Year 2025 Earnings Release and Investor Presentation.
3. Paramount Skydance Corporation, Q4 and Full-Year 2025 Earnings Release (SEC 8-K).
4. Netflix, Inc., Q4 2025 Shareholder Letter and accompanying Form 10-K disclosures.
5. Apple Inc., Q1 FY2026 Earnings Release (quarter ended 27 December 2025).
6. Comcast Corporation, Q4 2025 Earnings Release (SEC 8-K, Exhibit 99.1).
7. Amazon.com, Inc., Q4 2025 Earnings Release (SEC 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) and conference-call commentary on 2026 capital expenditure.

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