5 Reasons A Paramount-Warner Bros Merger Could Wreck Hollywood Forever

Little over a month has passed since the deal to merge Paramount Global and David Ellison's Skydance Media officially closed, yet already we're hearing news about plans for an even bigger merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. Combining two of the biggest companies in the entertainment industry would change Hollywood forever ... and almost certainly not in a good way.

Based on the history of giant corporate mergers in the past, even the realistic best case scenario for a WB-Paramount merger is going to have severe collateral damage. In the worst case scenario, it wrecks the mainstream movie and TV business forever — and in light of some of Ellison's stated business priorities and the controversial actions which Paramount took to get its most recent merger approved, there's reason to suspect this would be closer to the worst case than the best case. This article will examine five different reasons to hope that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav rejects Ellison's offer (and that regulators block it if he doesn't).

Until its merger with Disney was finalized in 2019, 20th Century Fox released between 11 and 25 films in wide release every year of the 21st century. Since the Disney merger, 20th Century Studios' theatrical output has been reduced to between three and five movies per year (six in 2025 if you count its copyright holder status on "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"). Fox's CG animation studio Blue Sky got shut down. The arthouse branch Searchlight has experienced similar reductions, with only three films released theatrically in 2025. Some of this can be blamed on sending more movies straight to streaming, but the fact of the matter is when two different movie studios become one, they're not gonna make as many films as they did before.

Going from six major studios in Hollywood to just five has already been hard on theaters. Going from five to four would be disastrous. After some years of struggle amidst the Discovery merger, Warner Bros. has finally had a consistent string of theatrical success stories this year, releasing films hugely popular with critics ("One Battle After Another"), general audiences ("Minecraft"), and both ("Sinners"). Paramount hasn't had the same success this year, but it's still made valuable contributions to the theatrical landscape with comedies like "The Naked Gun" and crowd-pleasers like "Roofman." How many great WB and Paramount films might not even be greenlit in a merged company not willing to spend as much money on risks?

Linear TV hasn't been in the best place lately. If the Paramount deal doesn't go through, Warner Bros. is already planning to spin off its cable TV networks (with the exceptions of HBO and Turner Classic Movies) into a separate debt-laden company. The Paramount deal, however, would prevent this split — and who knows what would happen to the various WB and Paramount networks under such a merger.

When Disney and 20th Century merged, the two companies' individual TV networks managed to survive by virtue of not being in direct competition with one another. Disney didn't have a prestige cable network like FX and Fox didn't have a kids' network like Disney Channel, and the merger pointedly did not include the FOX broadcast network, FOX News, or FOX Sports (all of which remain active competitors to Disney's ABC and ESPN). WB and Paramount, on the other hand, have a lot more direct competition between their networks.

Would Showtime still exist if its parent company already has HBO in the premium cable space? Do Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network merge into a black-white-and-orange blob? While reduced competition might sound appealing to streaming customers wishing to subscribe to fewer separate services, it's sure to be bad for the variety of television programming out there.

This is perhaps the most urgent reason this merger shouldn't happen, because it's the one where we already have the most evidence of disaster. While in the process of Paramount's merger with Skydance, CBS News settled with the Trump administration for $16 million over allegedly unfavorable editing of a "60 Minutes" interview — a lawsuit experts say CBS easily could have won. Shortly after Stephen Colbert criticized this settlement, it was announced "The Late Show" wouldn't be renewed with any host. The "South Park" guys are lucky they got a $1.5 billion deal just before their new season started, allowing them (for now) to mock their corporate overlords' bad decisions, hopefully without negative consequence.

Paramount is now looking at buying right-wing outlet The Free Press and putting owner Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News. If that's the current state of journalism and political commentary at Paramount-owned outlets, the idea that Paramount could soon also own CNN should be a huge red flag for anyone who cares about an actually free press that won't just kowtow to a lawsuit-happy President.

Six days before David Ellison announced his intentions to buy the studio, Warner Bros. became the third movie studio, after Universal and Disney, to sue the AI company Midjourney for copyright infringement. Maybe the timing here is purely coincidental. But consider that David's father Larry is one of the single biggest investors in the AI boom via his tech company Oracle, and that David's vision for Paramount involves using AI. An Ellison-owned WB would almost certainly lean more heavily towards a pro-AI stance — something many in Hollywood would consider an anti-worker stance.

But even aside from the heightened threat of AI taking away jobs, a WB-Paramount merger would result in tremendous job losses because that's what corporate mergers do. Thousands of Fox employees lost their jobs during the Disney merger, and the same is unavoidable a WB-Paramount merger. Given film and TV workers have been facing increasing work shortages since the streaming boom began to burst, now might be the absolute worst time for yet more merger-driven layoffs.

Let's be unrealistically optimistic for a second and imagine the best possible scenario for a WB-Paramount merger. Hypothetically, let's say it's a well-run business that still produces just as much film and TV as the separate companies did individually, drops Paramount's current censorship-happy attitude, and takes a strictly ethical and human-centered approach to AI with few if any layoffs.

Even in that unlikely scenario, the merger would still be a bad idea, on the simple grounds that corporate consolidation and monopolistic practices are bad for the culture. No one individual or family should have that much power over all mainstream media (and we haven't even touched upon how much power the Ellison family will have if Oracle also acquires TikTok). The functionality of a capitalist system depends on regulation and competition, and the idea the system could be so unregulated as to allow a single mega-corporation to crush all competition should worry all of us.