Just hours before contractual $7 million-a-day late fees kicked in on Thursday, a federal judge blessed Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. buyout.
Well, it's about time.
"After a fierce year-long battle," as Variety put it Wednesday afternoon, Paramount chief David Ellison will finally complete his buyout of troubled Warner Bros. "in the most expensive takeover in Hollywood history."
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín oversaw the California-led, multi-state antitrust suit seeking to block the buyout or impose conditions on it. Yesterday, she put her stamp of approval on Paramount’s settlement with the 12 Democrat state attorneys general who brought the case.
The merger had already been approved by the Department of Justice and even by the EU's busy-body nanny-staters, but California Attorney General Rob Bonta saw an angle and went for it.
The suit was such a nuisance — and put so many California jobs at risk — that California Democrat gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra practically begged the Blue State AGs to call it off, or at least settle quickly.
Nevertheless, the AGs seem to have gotten most of what they wanted.
I've written in recent months about the legal ins and outs and political maneuvers leading to this moment, and the California-led antitrust suit that, in my mind, amounted to nothing more than legal blackmail over the combined companies' future operations. And sure enough, among the deal's various terms, Paramount-Warner (or whatever the merged company's name turns out to be) will be required to establish an editorial-independence board for CBS News and CNN, plus an independent compliance monitor.
Professional Hollywood scold Mark Ruffalo, who at one time was a not entirely untalented actor, blasted the court's approval as "incredibly disappointing."
"This grassroots movement isn't going to fade away, and neither is our resolve," Ruffalo said to — I'm not sure, actually. "This was never about just one merger: This was about fighting back against corrupt oligarch billionaires trampling the interests of everyday people to line their own pockets."
Ruffalo's net worth is believed to be about $35 million, yet his most famous role was mostly CGI.
So if you were on the fence about whether the deal should go through, hopefully Ruffalo pushed you over to the Yes side, if not with me out in the fields of Oh HELL Yes, about a hundred yards further down from the fence.
But I digress yet once more.
As a business proposition, I remain agnostic about the merits of the buyout. This is an industry in flux, being chased out of its home city by bad governance, and the merged studios will have a lot of debt to service. How much? $80 billion. I don't know what kind of deal Paramount might have gotten for its bonds, but an average 7% interest rate would mean $5.6 billion a year in interest alone.
That's a lot of movie tickets and streaming fees.
Still, I wish them luck. Partly because these are two storied studios that have played a big part in American culture, and if a merger prevents one or both of them from getting parted out — which was one of Warner's possible fates — that would be wonderful. But mostly because I didn't want to see Warner's massive IP library become just another part of Netflix's content-slop firehose.
Was anybody really looking forward to black lesbian Casablanca — as an eight-part limited series — if Netflix had won the bidding war?
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