The Supreme Court slowly waddles into the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger

We wrote about this even-more-obviously-politically-fractious-than-the-rest-of-it legal action back in August, when AGs in Montana and Iowa stepped up to challenge the existing 11-state coalition now standing as the last big roadblock to David Ellison’s ambitions to own a frankly staggering amount of Hollywood’s standing infrastructure. Despite what opponents of the $111 billion deal might have expected, given the Court’s current heavily rightward bent, the Justices did not wind up acceding to requests that it set the deadline for this response to a lightning-fast single week; it opted for a generous and luxurious fortnight, instead.

As noted by, well, Deadline, setting the response deadline for September 25 doesn’t mean the Supreme Court has agreed to actually hear the motion, which accuses California’s Rob Bonta and his allies of allegedly harming the people of Montana and Iowa, plus all of Paramount’s employees, by trying to block the merger. (The blue states, meanwhile, contend that this is a simple antitrust investigation.) But it does set the initial clock for this avenue of attack—important because, on October 1, the extra fees that Paramount promised to pay to Warner Bros. if the merger got bogged down in regulations for an extended period of time begin to accrue at a rate of about $7 million a day; there’s a whole other argument currently running, meanwhile, about Paramount’s assertion that it’s going to make the AGs and their states cover that amount if they end up losing the overall legal challenge.

The Iowa and Montana attack exists wholly separate from that fight, though; importantly, even at this somewhat accelerated timetable, it likely won’t end up having an impact on anything until next year, when the AG’s court case against Paramount is expected to begin, in March of 2027.