By FishbowlLA Staff
One story ate the week. On Monday the State of California cut a deal with Paramount Skydance that clears the way for it to swallow Warner Bros. Discovery — and, in the fine print, bars the studio from packing up its Southern California lots. By Thursday a federal judge had declined to bless it. Everything else in LA media — the stations, the radio dial, the Times — spent the week in the wings.
California traded an antitrust case for a promise that Hollywood stays
Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Monday that he and 11 other attorneys general had settled the states’ antitrust challenge to the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger. The headline terms are the kind of thing a studio town reads twice: a five-year, court-enforceable commitment to release 30 films a year (20 of them wide) in years one and two and 32 a year in years three through five, at least four independent films annually, and at least $1.5 billion in additional domestic production spending above Paramount’s 2025 levels. Miss the film-output number and the company has to divest Miramax and pay $30 million per missing film into the WGA, IATSE, DGA and Teamsters health and retirement trusts.
There is also a $47.5 million workforce fund for people displaced by the merger, a $25 million independent-film purchasing fund, a five-year requirement that Paramount and Warner basic-cable channels be negotiated separately in carriage talks, a commitment to keep running a free streaming service, and an independent monitor to police all of it. Bonta was blunt that none of this is an endorsement: the settlement, he said, “is not a vote of support for this merger.” IATSE, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, the Teamsters and LiUNA Local 724 all put out statements welcoming it — a rare week in which every Hollywood local was reading from roughly the same page.
The context nobody in the AG’s release says out loud: Paramount had spent weeks letting it be known it might decamp for Georgia, Tennessee or Texas. Bonta also said he will push the Legislature next session to uncap the state film and TV tax credit.
Read more at the California Attorney General’s office →
Then a federal judge declined to rubber-stamp it
Thursday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín convened a virtual hearing and pointedly did not approve the consent decree, saying a ruling would come in “due course.” Her line of the day, per The Desk: “The court isn’t a rubber stamp of your agreement.” She wanted to satisfy herself the deal was reached at arm’s length rather than by collusion; California senior assistant AG Paula Blizzard and Paramount’s counsel both said it was.
The judge also gave the parties until noon Monday to respond to a letter from Sen. Cory Booker, who urged the court to run its own inquiry because the settlement arrived with no competitive impact statement, no public comment period and no formal chance for theaters, distributors, workers or consumers to weigh in. Paramount called Booker’s filing an improper “pseudo-amicus submission.”
Two details in the proposed decree matter more to Los Angeles than to anyone else. The first: for the life of the agreement, Paramount cannot leave the state or sell its film and TV production lots in Southern California. The second: violate the cable terms and the company could be forced to divest BET, VH1, Comedy Central, Smithsonian, Destination America and Science Channel. Blizzard told the court the states were wary of killing the deal outright, since Warner Bros. Discovery could simply go find another buyer.
The newsroom-independence board is already taking fire
Tucked into the settlement is a News Editorial Independence Board meant to insulate CNN and CBS News from their new owner. Former FCC nominee Gigi Sohn spent Tuesday taking it apart. She called the merger “terrible” and the settlement a “disaster,” said she was shocked there was no structural remedy — no required divestitures — and argued that behavioral conditions “rarely, if ever, work” because they depend on enforcement priorities that drift with the political weather. On the oversight board specifically, whose members Paramount’s own board will select: “This condition gives me hives.”
Sohn also read the $47.5 million worker fund as an admission that layoffs are coming, allowing only that the merging parties at least never claimed the deal would create jobs. She was unsparing about Bonta as a future enforcer, too. Meanwhile CNN worldwide chairman Mark Thompson told TheWrap on Wednesday he would like to stay “if Paramount finds me useful,” and Kara Swisher said Tuesday she is trying to get out of her CNN contract altogether. For a town that supplies a good deal of what those two newsrooms put on the air, the question of who actually controls the copy is not an abstraction.
Sacramento kept sweetening the pot anyway
Two days before the settlement landed, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2319 by Burbank Democrat Nick Schultz, creating a new tax credit for post-production work including editing and visual effects — the unglamorous back half of the business that has been quietly migrating out of Los Angeles for years. It is the latest move in a fight that runs back to 2009, when Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the state’s first $100 million-a-year film credit; the annual pot reached $750 million in 2025.
Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, who represents Hollywood and chairs the Assembly’s new Select Committee on Growing and Retaining the Creative Economy, told CalMatters he was pleased about Paramount but not reassured. “Now that other states are realizing what important, family-sustaining jobs these are, they’re competing very aggressively for these jobs,” he said. His committee expects to hold its first meeting in Los Angeles in October. Worth a calendar note for anyone who covers this beat.
That’s the week
Elsewhere, quiet. We swept the LA radio dial and came up empty — no format flips, no air-staff moves, no Nielsen news for this market in the past seven days. Nothing new from the Los Angeles Times or its owner, nothing new on the local press-freedom docket, and no station people-moves we could pin to the window. Some weeks the whole town is watching one federal courtroom. Know something we don’t? Tips are always welcome — the best items in this column start as somebody’s forwarded email.