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Paramount’s top legal officer said Tuesday that Attorney General Rob Bonta’s antitrust lawsuit blocking its proposed $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers would further “harm” the Hollywood economy as it has hemorrhaged jobs in recent years.
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Paramount Chief Legal Officer Makan Delrahim, a former federal antitrust prosecutor under the first Trump administration, and Bonta appeared Tuesday at a POLITICO conference at the downtown SAFE Credit Union convention center.
Both litigants laid out their theories, in separate appearances, about the motivations of Bonta’s lawsuit, supported by 11 other states, after a federal judge set a trial date for next March.
Delrahim said Bonta misunderstood the modern Hollywood economy, calling it a “different world” as audiences have fractured and customers have turned to streaming.
“This is a merger to increase output because we’re in a different world today,” he said. “The different world means this is not 20 years ago, where you have a handful of major companies that are just dealing with theatrical and DVD sales. That literally was what it used to be.”
Viewers now toggle between HBO, Amazon, CNN, Netflix and Fox News interchangeably, he said.
“All of those companies added together don’t add up to (the market cap of) Netflix. That just tells you where the market is going,” he said.
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Bonta said he believed Paramount was “eager to settle” the lawsuit, in which he argues the deal would consolidate most of the entertainment industry within the hands of a few studios and distributors and lead to massive job loss and limited creative output.
Paramount CEO David Ellison argued that as productions have moved to states with friendlier business climates. And he said that he was committed to producing at least 30 movies a year to stave off concerns about reduced output.
If Bonta’s suit is not settled before Oct. 1, Paramount will have to pay a daily $7 million fee to Warner Brothers shareholders, per the terms of the proposed deal.
Bonta said Ellison’s contention that his lawsuit is politically motivated because it would hand Ellison control of CNN was “false yesterday, false today, false tomorrow, false all day, every day.”
Bonta said he was also undeterred by the executive’s reported threat to relocate to Tennessee, dismissing it as “an attempt to blackmail the regulators who are daring to enforce the law fairly and firmly.”
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