A few months back, David Ellison was mid-victory lap. The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal had cleared the Justice Department, and the path ahead looked remarkably smooth. Hollywood was already resigned to the idea that the merger was done.
Fast forward to today: Ellison is writing defensive op-eds in The New York Times insisting he isn’t beholden to Trump despite evidence to the contrary — including that UFC fight — while his camp openly fumes that Paramount could take its business (and its jobs) out of California if the state won’t make peace — presumably peace on Paramount’s terms.
That is quite a metamorphosis — from inevitable new Hollywood mogul to I’m gonna take my toys and move to Tennessee.
As I’ve written before, what’s stunning about the Paramount-Warner fight this summer isn’t that the deal ran into legal trouble – trouble that was entirely predictable. It’s how quickly something Hollywood once again had said was a “done deal,” that only fools and dreamers dared oppose, became an open question.
The financial analyst community sets so much of the narrative for the trades, and the would-be big boys of Hollywood are almost never not in awe of deals — consolidation, companies getting bigger and bigger — with little concern for where things go from there.
The last time it happened on this scale with the Disney/Fox merger – the only time it has happened on this scale and, lest we forget, also under a Trump presidency to the benefit of a very close Trump supporter — no one made a peep.
So why is this time different?
Why did a merger almost nobody seemed interested in fighting suddenly produce lawsuits, an organized opposition movement and enough political resistance that monopoly expert Matt Stoller recently told me he now puts the odds of the deal being blocked at 60 percent?
Those odds are a little higher than I’d put them at the moment. But the fact that no one is writing them off as wild-eyed fantasy anymore shows you how dramatically the ground shifted. And fast.
And somewhere between Ellison’s victory lap and his Times op-ed, Hollywood learned something it hasn’t had much occasion to believe lately:
The inevitable can apparently become very un-inevitable when a few people decide to fight it.
So what sparked the uprising here?
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