21st Century Fox, Columbia, Tristar, Pixar, MGM, Turner, New Line, Lucasfilm, DreamWorks, Miramax, RKO—these were all, at some point, movie studios or production companies that weren't owned by a multibillion dollar empire like Disney, Sony, NBC Universal or Amazon. After decades of mergers, acquisitions, and tech companies horning their way into the TV and movie business, Hollywood looks an awful lot like the games industry. There are fewer owners than ever, they're richer than ever, with an ever-shrinking focus on making just the films that are likely to bank a billion at the box office.
We've seen how effectively this plan has worked out for the games industry: Tens of thousands of layoffs over the last few years, with companies like Embracer and Microsoft divesting themselves of studios they don't know what to do with nearly as quickly as they acquired them. Leave it to the games business to speedrun a path that the wider media ecosystem has been headed down for a long time.
As much of a mess as Hollywood is now, the balance of power stands to go even more askew if Paramount, led by Saudi-backed David Ellison—billionaire son of Trump pal Larry Ellision—gets to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. If there's any silver lining to the game's industry's disastrous consolidation in recent years, perhaps it will be regulators looking back at what they should have prevented and actually doing something this time around.
Unlikely? Absolutely. But there's at least evidence that a few are trying.
On Monday, California attorney general Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit to block Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying consolidation "leads to fewer opportunities for important stories to come to life, and fewer ways for audiences to encounter stories, ideas, and perspectives beyond their own experiences." The suit is backed by the attorneys general of 11 other states: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington. It claims that the merger would create a "media behemoth," leaving just four companies in control of "over 85 percent of all wide-release theatrical films in the United States." Paramount and Disney would alone command control of nearly 60% of all basic cable television in the country.
That just seems like an all-around bad idea, and an even worse one if you know anything about the Ellisons or consider how much of the news media they'd have under their thumb with an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. On top of that company's hundred-year movie legacy, it also owns and operates the likes of:
- CNN
- HBO
- DC
- WB Games
- Discovery Channel
- Cartoon Network
It would be a dramatic reshaping of an industry power structure that looked quite different just a few years ago, with Ellison taking over Paramount via a merger with his company Skydance in 2025. Unsurprisingly given his family's coziness with the Trump administration, that acquisition sailed through the FCC—after the company agreed to pay the president $16 million in a bunk lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and subsequently canceled Stephen Colbert's Late Show. FCC chair Brendan Carr, meanwhile, is investigating Disney for "DEI discrimination" and has already more or less shrugged at the state lawsuits taking aim at the Warner Bros. acquisition.
The UK's communications regulators may also be poised to protest the deal. Paramount's lawyers, of course, have insisted that the merger is actually "pro-competitive," despite the thousands of jobs the company has already cut and the thousands more it surely would after taking over Warner Bros. And WB Games has already been dismissed as an insignificant part of the acquisition story, so it's hard to imagine the takeover being good news on the gaming front.
Fans of misery will, I suppose, have a new streaming lament configuration to look forward to as HBO Max and Paramount+ will somehow find a way to charge more for streaming apps that inexplicably offer smaller portions of their back catalogs.
The last administration's FTC at least tried, though ultimately failed, to stop Microsoft's acquisition of Activision. The federal government isn't even interested in trying this time around—but the Columbia Journalism Review writes that the states at least have a chance to stop the merger. If they don't, the combined company's new $80 billion in debt will inevitably mean dramatic cost-cutting—exactly the sort that Xbox's Asha Sharma hinted at when saying the publisher would be "shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects."
Is there a good outcome here? Even if the deal falls apart, that presumably leaves unpopular Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav in charge of a movie legacy he seems uninterested in beyond its ability to make a buck. The last four years in the games biz have imparted one message above all, though: It can always get worse.
