Jane Fonda is narrating her own trip to the movie theater — not to wax poetic about heartbreak or “that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim” à la Nicole Kidman — but to warn the public about corporate mergers in Hollywood.
This week, the two-time Oscar winner posted an Instagram video spoofing Kidman’s viral AMC Theatres ad with a timely message. The video, produced by the Los Angeles comedy troupe The Groundlings, is Fonda’s latest PSA with the Committee for the First Amendment.
“Come to this place for mergers,” Fonda says via voiceover as she strides into a theater before pulling out her phone and watching Wonder Woman on the small screen. “We stream to self-silence, to censor, to slop. Where content is chosen by the best billionaires we have. Dazzling focus-grouped, pre-digested content that lets your brain not do too much thinky-thinky. Somehow, corporate greed feels good in a place like this. Somehow, mergers feel good in a place like this.”
But before the movie starts, the Grace and Frankie alum is ushered out of the theater by a man (Andrew Leeds) saying she has to leave so that the theater can be demolished and replaced by a data center.
In the caption to the video, Fonda reiterated the warning she issued — via an op-ed for The Ankler— about Netflix’s impending $82.7-billion acquisition of Warner Bros.
“Regardless of which company ends up acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery or its parts, the resulting impact is clear: Consolidation at this scale would be catastrophic for an industry built on free expression, for the creative workers who power it, and for consumers who depend on a free, independent media ecosystem to understand the world,” Fonda wrote. “It will mean fewer jobs, fewer creative risks, fewer news sources and far less diversity in the stories Americans get to hear.”
Fonda and the rest of the Committee for the First Amendment also spoke out against the proposed Netflix–Warner Bros deal in an Instagram statement last week. “Make no mistake, this is not just a catastrophic business deal that could destroy our creative industry. It is a constitution crisis exacerbated by the administration’s demonstrated disregard for the law,” the statement reads, in part.