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Paramount, states reject calls for deeper review of merger deal

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Paramount Skydance and the state attorneys general are defending their proposed settlement in the face of skeptical questions from Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), arguing that the judge overseeing the case should approve the agreement without the deeper review the senator has requested.

Booker, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, sent a letter to the court last week asking how the five-year settlement agreement was reached and whether its terms were adequate. He urged the judge to conduct an “independent public-interest review” before approving it.

Warners Execs Stare Down the Ellison Era

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With the merger all but done, and those billions in synergies waiting to be realized, the center of anxiety in Hollywood might be at Warner Bros., where a whole suite of executives will have to decipher the Ellison way.

Now that California Attorney General Rob Bonta has folded like a cheap umbrella (looking like a hostage in his press conference announcing the settlement), the reality of Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is hitting Hollywood hard—the way a thing that you knew was coming can still stun you with its impact. The mood inside Warners is grim. “This is like doomsday,” one insider told me. “People are bracing for thousands and thousands of layoffs, and [the Ellisons are] going to do it quickly.”

Paramount, Blue State AGs Hit Cory Booker Over Antitrust Suit Settlement Comments

Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery, plus a dozen blue states, want Cory Booker to stay in his own lane when it comes to the antitrust settlement over the companies’ $111 billion mega-merger.

“The fact that a proposed consent decree does not contain every outcome that one party may have wanted in a multilateral negotiation does not make it substantively unfair,” Monday’s court-ordered response states. “This is the very essence of a negotiated agreement that includes compromises on behalf of all of the parties involved,” notes Para and WBD lawyers in the filing that posted to the docket just 30 minutes before U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin’s noon PT deadline.

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