Warnermount: Is Anyone Awake Out There to Stop This?
This is an emergency, and Hollywood’s sad-sack shtick needs to end
This is part one of my two pieces coming today about the proposed Warnermount. Look for a frighteningly smart and insightful conversation (and transcript) between me and monopoly expert Matt Stoller of the BIG newsletter later.
Okay, please explain to me why we are still supposed to think the Dawn of Skydance is a good thing for Hollywood.
Acquisitions are all guilty until they are proven innocent. The acquisition generally starts, as is the case in the Paramount/Skydance deal, by taking money out of the company to pay off the various parties in the agreement.
In the Paramount deal, Shari Redstone and the National Amusement investors got $2.4 billion. Then there will be all sorts of costs of paying for the transaction itself — money taken out of the company, a company that was already perpetually cash-strapped.
But that was okay, or at least, it came out as a win, because at least we were keeping Paramount intact as a studio, making films and releasing them to theaters, and presiding over some amount of streaming production. It was better than the very real alternative of the company being stripped down and sold off for parts.
While Jeff Shell warned that, in his own words, “painful” cuts were coming — meaning the new studio will immediately be smaller than the old one — this was expected and acceptable, because the studio would survive.
Along the way to the deal, both parties had to make all sorts of horrible concessions to the would-be autocrat in the White House, including settling his ridiculous lawsuit, throwing 60 Minutes under the bus and all kinds of other things we can only guess at because the full picture has not been provided on things that may or may not be happening, such as:
Neutering the independence of CBS News, under it seems, the leadership of Bari Weiss, an astounding development.
Giving Trump free ad time to promote his various causes.
Even this, as groveling, spineless and morally compromised as it was, was barely, sorta, maybe… if we have to choose… okay, because Paramount would remain a studio.
But now we’ve learned that while Paramount will be fine, Warner Bros. is the legacy studio that will likely get folded up and — we can only assume, like when Disney bought Fox — essentially eliminated.
How is this AT. ALL. OK?