You Won, David Ellison. Don’t Blow It

So there you have it. David Ellison won.

Paramount is acquiring Warner Bros. The people who said this deal couldn’t be stopped were right. Those of us who believed it could be stopped were not.

So congratulations. Sincerely. Now comes the part that matters: proving the skeptics wrong.

First: Those who sneered that you can’t stop the billionaires — with a corrupt political elite in their pockets — can rejoice that the safe bet paid off again.  

I mean, once a California politician became the hero of this thing, we should have known we were doomed and headed for the hills. The superpower of California Democrats is their ability to find the longest, most tortured and difficult path to the worst possible outcome. For them, the cliché about how you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs doesn’t even suffice. It’s more like: If you want a plate of moldering roadkill, you have to have a 200-car pileup.

We can go crazy trying to figure out why Rob Bonta made a sudden about-face into the depths of cowardice. Given that literally a month ago he was telling The Ankler’s Elaine Low that Paramount needed to “sleep in the bed that they made” — and that behavioral remedies were a nonstarter when it came to settlement talks — he looks to all appearances like a politician character in a gangster film who was taken aside and had some facts of life laid out for him.

If this had been the plan all along, to drive up the stakes until you get to a place of maximum leverage and then extract concessions, then, okay.

But to drive up the stakes until you get to a place of maximum leverage and then extract, at best, some fake paper concessions with lots of conditionals and exit ramps — I’m just not sure I follow.  

And the fact that he pursued this — the highest-profile case he has ever been near, effectively making his profile on this — and then pulled the rug out on his own reputation… it’s just so inexplicable that one assumes there must have been hidden hands at work.

But really, why should we think this is anything unusual? Building up a reputation and then taking a wrecking ball to the edifice you’ve just constructed — that’s what our state pols do.

Anyway, I’m done with Bonta, and there are a lot of places to go now — several rocks to turn over, and a new world order to navigate.

And to be clear: I’m not rooting for failure. Quite the opposite. The deal is done. Hollywood badly needs these studios to work. So if Ellison can preserve jobs, make great movies and television, keep production in Los Angeles and turn Paramount-Warner into something stronger rather than merely smaller, I’ll happily eat every word I’ve written.

But first, let’s see what Ellison actually promised. Because one of the biggest promises of all isn’t even in the deal.