\n\tAt first it just seemed like a happy coincidence \u2014 a Hollywood agency mogul supporting a Hollywood corporate merger.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAri Emanuel\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last Tuesday saying David Ellison buying Warner Bros. was a good idea and that those\u00a012 Democratic AG\u2019s who have\u00a0sued<\/a>\u00a0to stop the deal were on the wrong warpath.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe attorneys general should drop this case and get back to enforcing the laws as they are written,\u201d the WME chief wrote, as he extolled a Paramount<\/a>-WB tie-up and said it would be good for the business.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSure, Ellison\u00a0had committed<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>last year to pay Emanuel\u2019s TKO nearly $8 billion to broadcast UFC fights, a fact he conveniently neglected to mention. And the timing certainly benefited Ellison \u2014 earnings were coming, a time when Wall Street would be paying close attention and could express its worry financially about a deal falling through. But still, just a nice little stocking-stuffer under the mogul\u2019s tree.<\/p>\n \n\tOver the past week, though, the support has started to look a lot less like passive presents and a lot more like an active strategy. The play? Make it seem like a lot of Democrat-approved personalities have no problem with the merger, isolating as regulatory crazies Rob Bonta, Tish James and the rest of the dozen AGs suing to block the deal. Never mind that these are some of the country\u2019s most decorated legal enforcers, with many decades of experience, from places as different as Arizona and Massachusetts.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe maneuvers unfolded like a stunt pilot\u2019s careful course-plotting.\u00a0A few days after the Emanuel op-ed came an anonymously sourced story Friday in the\u00a0Journal<\/a>\u00a0about how one of the preeminent national Democratic leaders, California governor Gavin Newsom, was behind the deal foursquare, according to \u201cpeople close to the suit.\u201d\u00a0\u201cNewsom\u2019s office has encouraged Attorney General\u00a0Rob Bonta\u2019s\u00a0office, which has independent authority to file such suits, to find a resolution out of court,\u201d the paper said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tNever mind that Newsom has a long history of deferring to giant corporations (remember his 11th-hour capitulation <\/a>to Big Tech <\/a>\u00a0on Scott Wiener\u2019s AI bill in 2024?)\u00a0\u2014\u00a0this merger was going to create jobs!\u00a0(\u201cState employment would suffer\u201d without a deal, the paper said Newsom has told colleagues, never mind that no credible economist has supplied such evidence.) Another happy coincidence. Or, given that\u00a0the paper was pointedly not citing sources close to Newsom, perhaps part of an Ellison-led strategy.<\/p>\n \n\tThen today, an op-ed of Ellison\u2019s own in a redoubt of mainstream liberalism,\u00a0The New York Times.\u00a0The mogul trotted out all the usual arguments for legacy media mergers these days \u2014\u00a0if we don\u2019t do this the tech companies win, movie theaters should survive, Hollywood should be employed.\u00a0\u201cWhat I can promise is the work, and more of it,\u201d he\u00a0wrote<\/a>, using the noun four times, which is four times more than he used the noun Donald Trump. Los Angeles County researchers have concluded that the merger will likely lead to less work<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tMeanwhile, Ari has been hitting the hustings, appearing on CNBC Tuesday morning to rattle off a series of Ellison talking points and praising the mogul.\u00a0\u201cThis is a guy who said \u2018hey I\u2019m going to make 30 movies a year, 45-day release,\u201d Emanuel said. \u201cHe\u2019s gonna spend he says 30 billion in content a year. We need that for the economy of Hollywood.\u201d The comments wouldn\u2019t have been out of place on the Paramount investor earnings-call Tuesday, where executives touted all these numbers and used words like \u201cpro-competitive\u201d\u00a0to describe the deal. If there\u2019s one thing we know about capitalism, it\u2019s that combining \u00a0two major companies leads to more competition.<\/p>\n \n\tThese media hits that aimed to buck the headwinds even involved a\u00a0literal plane\u00a0\u2014 \u00a0the day Bonta and the AGs were suing, Ellison jetted to Washington to\u00a0lobby for<\/a>\u00a0a federal tax credit, a news stunt meant as much to lobby support among Hollywood as to win over legislators. One story his coverage play overshadowed that week: ProPublica\u2019s bombshell report<\/a> that Paramount allegedly provided gifts to FCC commissioners reviewing the deal.<\/p>\n \n\tMore of these pieces are no doubt coming, perhaps even in my own outlet. More\u00a0foot soldiers arguing for the merger\u2019s value to the business, or the world, or the First Amendment. Never mind that the WGA \u2014 those fierce opponents of free expression! \u2014 have\u00a0just sued<\/a>\u00a0to stop the \u00a0deal. Doesn\u2019t the world\u2019s richest family have the\u00a0right\u00a0to own CNN? Isn\u2019t that enshrined in the Constitution?<\/p>\n \n\tAll these enlisted authors are a shrewd flyer, and you need to give Ellison\u2019s team credit for landing it so effectively.<\/p>\n \n\tBut you also don\u2019t need an advanced radar beacon to see what\u2019s happening. Having courted MAGA and Donald Trump to win the deal federal approval (how many Kennedy Center boxes and UFC ringside seats can one centibillionaire\u2019s son fill?) Ellison is now pivoting to Dems to take care of the state challenge.<\/p>\n \n\tNot regulatory-minded Dems, as that group, from\u00a0Elizabeth Warren<\/a>\u00a0to Cory Booker to Adam Schiff, have all been sharply critical of the deal and asked hard questions about combining the country\u2019s third and fourth biggest pure-play entertainment companies. Not those decorated and often landslide-winning Democratic AGs, either.<\/p>\n \n\tBut if you get enough Dem-ish poobahs like Newsom and the Kamala-donating Ari on your side, maybe people won\u2019t notice all the Democrats who aren\u2019t. Or enough of their constituents will lose interest, causing AGs to do the same.<\/p>\n \n\tHeck, maybe people will even magically forget that no fewer than 1,000 creatives, from \u00a0Bryan Cranston to J.J. Abrams to Glenn Close to Lin-Manuel Miranda, all\u00a0signed a letter<\/a>\u00a0this spring opposing the deal, noting how a merger \u201cwould further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries \u2014 and the audiences we serve \u2014 can least afford it\u201d and lead to \u201cfewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.\u201d Who can remember any of those beloved entertainers\u2019 warnings when an agent tells us something is good for creativity?<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s a reason Paramount needs the deal to happen. Warner Bros. Discovery\u00a0turned a profit <\/a>of $1.2 billion this past quarter once you strip out all the money they had to pay as part of the acquisition (like severance costs). That\u2019s a lot of profit for a company like Paramount, which revealed Tuesday that in the same quarter it netted\u00a0$41 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd there\u2019s a reason Paramount needs the deal to happen soon. Starting Oct. 1, Paramount must pay Warners shareholders $7 million\u00a0every day\u00a0until the deal closes. By the second week, they\u2019ll have wiped out all the profits they earned this quarter. By the spring, they\u2019ll have wiped out the profits of the company they\u2019re buying. One can\u2019t imagine a lot of joy on Melrose, then, when the word came down Tuesday that the trial\u00a0won\u2019t start until March<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tAlso, the deal is partly bankrolled by Larry Ellison and his significant AI investments. And can that boom go on forever?<\/p>\n \n\tThe reality is the AGs may not just have the law on their side \u2014 they have the leverage. And with every week that passes they have more of it. (With even more come potential Democrat victories in November.) Could they extract a major settlement \u2014 possibly even forcing a carve-out of CNN? Don\u2019t rule it out, no matter how many UFC fights Ellison attends with the president.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWinning comes down to having the best stories,\u201d Paramount CFO Dennis Cinelli told investors on the earnings call Tuesday. Ellison and his allies will keep telling them. That doesn\u2019t mean it will result in victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At first it just seemed like a happy coincidence \u2014 a Hollywood agency mogul supporting a Hollywood corporate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":803232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28,4208],"class_list":["post-803231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-paramount"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/803232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}