The champagne corks may be popping right now at Paramount over the David Ellison-owned company’s successful bid for Warner Bros Discovery, but up in Sacramento the mood is far from celebratory over the latest possible Hollywood mega-merger.
“Paramount/Warner Bros is not a done deal,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told Deadline this evening after Netflix dropped out of bidding for WB’s studio and streaming assets.
“These two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny — the California Department of Justice has an open investigation, and we intend to be vigorous in our review,” the Golden State’s top lawman added.
Bonta’s cold water on the Paramount-WBD fireworks comes a week after the CA Department of Justice opened a probe into any deal to take over WB — be it Netflix or Ellison’s team. A probe that could see legal action if the deal doesn’t pass muster.
“The film and entertainment industry not only has historical importance to our state, it also is a critical sector that buoys the state’s economy of California and touches the lives of Americans daily,” the ambitious AG said on February 20. “The proposed Warner Brothers transactions must receive a full and robust review, and California is taking a very close look.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta
While not as harsh as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s prediction of an “antitrust disaster” out of a Paramount and WBD union, Bonta’s words echoed to some extent those of fellow Democrat and California’s junior Senator Adam Schiff from earlier today. Both Sens. Warren and Schiff point to potential inside influence after Donald Trump‘s “good friend” Ellison seemingly snagged his second legacy studio in less than two years.
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“What was true for Netflix is still true now for Paramount,” Sen. Schiff said Thursday “The merger of two of Hollywood’s biggest studios must be subject to the highest levels of scrutiny, free from White House political influence, to determine its impact on American jobs, freedom of speech, and the future of one of our nation’s greatest exports.”
On the other side of America’s fractured political spectrum, the cautions expressed by AG Bonta and Sen. Schiff, were mirrored to some extent by 11 GOP Attorneys Generals in a letter sent to Pam Bondi on the same day of the State of the Union. On the back of a DOJ antitrust probe launched on February 20, the state AGs on February 24 told the federal AG they wanted “to express our concerns that the proposed merger between Netflix and Warner Brothers will likely result in undue market concentration that stifles competition and therefore creates higher prices, lower reliability, and less innovation for one of America’s major industries — all to the detriment of American consumers.”
In what is now a moot measure, the MAGA AGs were from Montana, Alabama, Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, who pushed to have the state’s film and TV tax credit program pumped up to $750 million last year, to kick start production and industry employment, has not yet spoken out on today’s big Tinseltown shifts. Neither for that matter, has Trump, who Newsom relentlessly trolls online.
In both men’s cases, it is surely a matter of when.
