Paramount’s Mission: Impossible Antitrust Case
Hollywood loves a sequel, and the antitrust fight over Paramount Skydance’s proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is becoming one. First came the familiar streaming-monopoly scare. Now comes the more personal version: the writers, drivers, and actors who make the movies fear that a combined studio will need far fewer of them—and they are carrying that fear to antitrust regulators on three continents.
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened a formal review of the deal, giving itself until Aug. 7 to decide whether to clear the transaction or launch a deeper investigation. California, New York, and possibly other states are preparing a lawsuit to block it. The European Commission is conducting its own review, while leaks suggest the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) may ultimately approve the merger.
That much is familiar. Large mergers often attract scrutiny from multiple regulators at once. This particular battle has been brewing for more than a year and has taken several unexpected turns, including Netflix’s failed attempt to acquire WBD.
At first, the focus was streaming. Critics warned that combining Paramount+ and HBO Max would create a video-streaming giant. That theory has quietly faded. Even after the merger, the combined company would rank only fourth among streaming services, behind Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video, which together account for roughly 65% of subscription viewers. Kristian Stout and Ben Sperry analyzed the viewing data and found the merged firm would still trail YouTube in total TV viewing time. A company struggling to achieve scale is a difficult monopolist to imagine.
The debate has since moved upstream, from streaming platforms to the studios that produce movies and television shows, and to the people who work in them. That is where the Writers Guild, the Teamsters, and state attorneys general have concentrated their fire. It is also where the stronger antitrust argument may lie—maybe.
To see why, it helps to remember why WBD is for sale in the first place. As I wrote when the company announced plans to break itself apart, it is carrying nearly $38 billion in debt from two previous mergers while its cable networks generate shrinking cash flows. This is a company searching for scale and a cleaner balance sheet, not one so dominant that it can afford to starve Hollywood of work.