Though Paramount hopes to run its wrecking ball through what remains of Hollywood by the end of Q3, the legal battle to stop David Ellison from buying Warner Bros. is just getting started. Today, the Writers Guild of America announced that it has filed suit in the Northern District of California to block the merger it claims will put its writers out of business. The WGA joins the 12 state attorneys general, including those in California and New York, which filed suit against Paramount yesterday. In response, Paramount is threatening to leave California and break the law in a state more welcoming to criminal monopolies.
“Writers have seen merger after merger result in an industry dominated by just a few studios with tremendous power to exert downward pressure on our pay and working conditions,” the WGA wrote in a statement. “If Warner Bros. merges with Paramount, the combined company would become the largest employer of writers. Both companies are already industry giants and the loss of head-to-head competition will directly impact writers at every level as well as the pipeline for emerging writers.”
The Department of Justice’s antitrust investigators gave the merger a rubber stamp earlier this summer, presumably in hopes of turning CNN into CBS by the midterms. The DOJ found no competition issues with allowing the Ellison family to take on massive amounts of debt to purchase its second major movie studio in less than a year. Last summer, David Ellison’s Skydance purchased Paramount and now hopes to combine its assets with Warner Bros. Discovery’s, which, according to California State AG Rob Bonta, would give them an outsized advantage over the rest of the market. This not only threatens filmmakers, creatives, and everyone working in the movie and television business, but also movie theaters and consumers. And despite Paramount’s stated commitment to releasing 30 films a year—something Bonta calls “unenforceable”—the Disney-Fox and WB-Discovery mergers prove the opposite. But what do we know? The economy’s working great for the Trump family.
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