Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery

Nilay Patel: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/1004286/senator-adam-schiff...

> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.

Checks out:

Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner

June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia

April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery

This is more consolidation of US media under extremely pro-Israel ownership. I don't think this will work out as well as they hope (look at CBS -- Bari Weiss has driven it into the ground) but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over, including both "news" and "entertainment", including TikTok.

https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-medi...

A behemoth indeed but the numbers also tell an interesting story. For TV screen share, Youtube has ~13% of total US viewing time vs ~6% for Paramount/Warner. They also go into this merger with staggering debt which does not bode well.

It's never been a better time to start consuming less. Let's drive that demand way, way down.

Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?

I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.

not a fan of CNN, but a very right leaning person is the owner of CNN now. pre-dictatorship vibes!!

First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.

Yes! What the consumer needs! Less competition! Hurrah!

Sorry for the sarcasm.

So what does this mean? Superman vs. the Transformers?

I'm not sure I was interested in either company by themselves—less likely to be interested in the merged one.

Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career [1], which spent $60M on Fly Boys. It grossed $17M. There's a very real "failed in Hollywood to alt-right" pipeline, actually.

The truth is that Hollywood was already dying and it had been systematically dismantled by short-term profit seeking. It dismantled the system that created hugely valuable properties like Friends, Cheers, ER, Seinfeld, etc where 22 episodes were created every year to a system where streamers could cut out having to pay for syndication by creating 8 episodes every 3-4 years.

You see a lot of stars of shows having podcasts now from shows that ended years or even decades ago (The Office, The Sopranos). In a healthy ecosystem, successful actors would be working actors.

You see productions chase tax rebates all across North America such as Georgia and Canada where once productions were typically based in LA and that had a ton of ecosystem benefits. As soon as the tax rebates go, so do the productions.

Gavin Newsom clearly isn't serious about becoming president because approving this merger is going to lead to even more layoffs and fewer productions. It's going to be deeply unpopular in California. For good reason.

So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing. Housing is an input cost to everything in that locations. LA used to be relatively cheap. It had a mix of housing types from single family homes to mansions to budget apartments so Ho actors, writers, etc could reasonably start out.

And then with declining demand as productions spread out and less pilots and shows were being made overall, the industry has become dominated by nepo babies.

I actually think that in future centuries when history is written about the turning point for American empire, it'll be the downfall of Hollywood. You cannot overstate the value the US had to export culture to the entire world with Hollywood.

[1]: https://brobible.com/culture/article/david-ellison-tried-to-...

Seems fine. There are more options for entertainment than ever. Often these mergers don't work out anyway.

So when do they raise prices and start laying folks off?

You have to admit that David Ellison is extremely talented at being born to one of the wealthiest people in human history.

I've seen plenty of negative (and legitimate) sentiment around this merger but I'm cautiously optimistic that David Ellison, being half the age of anyone else with greenlight authority, will do something different/better.

Who else is mourning the end of Star Trek?

so does this mean i get paramount plus for free with my hbo?

So they’ve committed to for example releasing 30-32 movies a year for the next five years [1] but after that, no promises. Good thing mergers are famously temporary and we never need to worry about the next 10 years! Oh wait…

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-prom...

When do we get Bugs Bunny on the Enterprise ?

So all TV is going to be republican propaganda now. Cool from some perspectives, horrible from the other 9 out of 10 situations.

In 1 or 2 years AI movies will be better in everything. From acting , to camera work to environments to story telling. Check out the quality of some of work already out there. There is a massive shift going on. China is going full speed mode. The film industry will be reshaped. Warner Bros should have used those billions to purchase products like seadance. Otherwise they are out

Let's hope that the fears of new owners being rightwing are correct so we can finally see The Censored Eleven in their full glory.

Another nail in Americas coffin.

How much did the Gulf states pledge towards this?

From what I see on r/stablediffusion, Hollywood has maybe 2 years left, in the optimistic case.