A state prosecutor's 60-day delay on the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is a devastating blow to the only people who matter: industry insiders who just want a single, streamlined PR department to pitch to.
It has been a harrowing week for the dreamers. Just as we were finally preparing to celebrate the glorious, inevitable union of Paramount and Warner Bros.—a beautiful marriage of intellectual property that would finally put Bugs Bunny and Tom Cruise under the same ruthless corporate umbrella—the state of Oregon decided to make it all about them. The state’s Attorney General’s office has filed an injunction to delay the merger by 60 days, muttering something about antitrust law and market consolidation.
Make no mistake: this is an attack on storytelling itself. I know this because I was told so, in confidence, over a $48 chopped salad with a second-tier publicist for David Zaslav at the Polo Lounge last Tuesday. As we picked at our radicchio, she looked me in the eye and explained the profound emotional toll this delay is taking on the C-suite. These executives have spent months carefully planning which thousands of redundant employees to terminate, and now, some bureaucrat in the Pacific Northwest is asking them to put those pink slips on ice. It is, frankly, inhumane.
The Oregon A.G. has the audacity to suggest that the Department of Justice’s rapid approval of this megadeal was "corrupt." I find this incredibly naive. If by "corrupt," you mean a handful of well-placed golf games, a few lavish dinners in Bethesda, and a mutual understanding that the American public shouldn't have to choose between two different streaming platforms, then sure, call it what you want. In Hollywood, we just call that the art of the deal.
Think of the poor Paramount Skydance lawyers. They have worked tirelessly to structure a merger so complex, so dense, and so baffling that even the DOJ didn't bother reading it before stamping it. To have Oregon swoop in now and demand transparency is a slap in the face to the fine craft of corporate obfuscation.
Furthermore, we need to consider what happens if this merger fails and the industry is forced to remain fragmented. We might see a return to the dark ages, where multiple studios had to compete for our attention by taking risks on mid-budget original scripts. I shudder at the thought. The beauty of the Paramount-Warner Bros. monolith is that it completely eliminates the need for competition, freeing up billions of dollars that can be safely redirected into a single, twelve-part television series about the Joker's dry cleaner.
Our financial models show that if we can just legally merge Batman, the NFL broadcasting rights, and the CBS comedy lineup into a single uncancelable monthly subscription, we will finally achieve world peace.
What the legal minds in Multnomah County fail to understand is that having two separate studios is simply exhausting for the rest of us. Do you know how hard it is to maintain access to two different sets of red carpets? To pretend to like two different slates of superhero reboots? If Paramount and Warner Bros. merge, I only have to suck up to one monolithic entity. This is about efficiency.
Judge Eric Dahlin is scheduled to hold a hearing on Monday to decide if this 60-day delay will hold. I can only hope he considers the real victims here: the trades. If we can't write breathless puff pieces about the Warner-Paramount synergy rollout this quarter, we are going to have to go back to reviewing independent films, and nobody wants that. I urge the court to look past the so-called law, think of the awards season implications, and let these billionaires finish what they started.