Hollywood loves a sequel, and the antitrust fight over Paramount Skydance’s proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is becoming one. First came the familiar streaming-monopoly scare. Now comes the more personal version: the writers, drivers, and actors who make the movies fear that a combined studio will need far fewer of them—and they are carrying that fear to antitrust regulators on three continents.
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened a formal review of the deal, giving itself until Aug. 7 to decide whether to clear the transaction or launch a deeper investigation. California, New York, and possibly other states are preparing a lawsuit to block it. The European Commission is conducting its own review, while leaks suggest the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) may ultimately approve the merger.
That much is familiar. Large mergers often attract scrutiny from multiple regulators at once. This particular battle has been brewing for more than a year and has taken several unexpected turns, including Netflix’s failed attempt to acquire WBD.
At first, the focus was streaming. Critics warned that combining Paramount+ and HBO Max would create a video-streaming giant. That theory has quietly faded. Even after the merger, the combined company would rank only fourth among streaming services, behind Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video, which together account for roughly 65% of subscription viewers. Kristian Stout and Ben Sperry analyzed the viewing data and found the merged firm would still trail YouTube in total TV viewing time. A company struggling to achieve scale is a difficult monopolist to imagine.
The debate has since moved upstream, from streaming platforms to the studios that produce movies and television shows, and to the people who work in them. That is where the Writers Guild, the Teamsters, and state attorneys general have concentrated their fire. It is also where the stronger antitrust argument may lie—maybe.
To see why, it helps to remember why WBD is for sale in the first place. As I wrote when the company announced plans to break itself apart, it is carrying nearly $38 billion in debt from two previous mergers while its cable networks generate shrinking cash flows. This is a company searching for scale and a cleaner balance sheet, not one so dominant that it can afford to starve Hollywood of work.
The Five-to-Four Mirage
Hollywood’s “Big Five” studios—Disney, Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Sony—accounted for roughly three-quarters of the domestic box office in 2024. A Paramount-WBD merger would reduce that group from five major studios to four. The combined firm would control less than one-quarter of theatrical revenue, making it the second-largest distributor behind Disney.
For critics, that five-to-four consolidation is the entire case. It shouldn’t be.
I ran the same concentration calculations antitrust agencies would run. Using 2024 box-office shares, a combined Paramount-WBD would produce a post-merger Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI)—a standard measure of market concentration—of roughly 1,790 in theatrical distribution. Under the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) 2023 Merger Guidelines, markets generally become “highly concentrated” only when the HHI exceeds 1,800, the threshold at which the agencies’ structural presumption against a merger kicks in. By the agencies’ own yardstick, this deal falls just short of that line, although it comes close.
The result is even less dramatic when viewed over a longer period. Using 2014 box-office shares, the HHI would be only about 1,540.
That points to a deeper problem with treating box-office shares as a reliable proxy for market power: they do not stay put for long. A studio’s annual share often rises or falls on the strength of a few tentpole releases. Warner Bros., for example, jumped from roughly 12% of the box office in 2024 to about 18% in 2025, driven by the performance of its film slate rather than any meaningful change in market structure. Numbers that swing that sharply from year to year provide a shaky foundation for judging durable market power.
The Best Case Against the Deal
The labor case is more serious, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a wave-off.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) came out against the deal in October, calling it a “disaster for writers” and pledging to help regulators block it. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents thousands of drivers, location scouts, and other below-the-line workers, filed a white paper urging the DOJ to sue unless the parties commit to enforceable production and jobs guarantees.
Their theory is monopsony, or buyer power. Most merger analysis asks whether a combined firm can raise prices for consumers. Monopsony asks the mirror-image question: whether the merged firm can push down what it pays suppliers. Here, those suppliers are the writers, directors, actors, and other creative workers who sell their labor to studios.
The 2023 Merger Guidelines put monopsony squarely on the table, and the logic is intuitive. If a screenwriter can shop a script to five major buyers, those buyers bid against one another. Take one buyer away, and the writer’s next-best option gets worse.
This is not a fringe theory. When Penguin Random House tried to buy Simon & Schuster, the DOJ blocked the deal in 2022, and Judge Florence Pan agreed that combining two of the “Big Five” publishers would harm competition to acquire “anticipated top-selling books.” The relevant market was not all books. It was the narrower segment where a few deep-pocketed buyers compete for marquee work. Apply that lens to Hollywood, and one can see a plausible claim about the market for A-list talent.
But a caution about monopsony: Buyer-power claims, especially in labor markets, are among the hardest in antitrust to win. A plaintiff must define a market for a particular kind of worker, show that the merger meaningfully shrinks that worker’s set of buyers, and trace lower pay to the deal rather than to the many other forces moving wages at the same time.
Penguin Random House cleared that bar, but it stands out because so few cases do. That is why heavy reliance on a labor theory is often a tell. When the fight over a merger like this settles on monopsony rather than prices or output in the studio and streaming markets, it usually signals that the conventional output-market case has already come up short.
So does the labor claim hold here? Three things cut against it.
First, a Paramount-WBD combination presents a milder buyer-power problem than the Netflix-WBD deal everyone was modeling last winter. Paramount runs a smaller content operation than Netflix, so the combined firm’s pull in the talent market would be more modest than the scarier scenarios assumed.
Second, writer and director pay has been under pressure for a decade, and mergers are only a small part of that story. The shift from network television to streaming moved creators away from backend profit participation and toward upfront fees, in part because streaming services do not disclose the viewership data that backend deals depend on. Residual formulas come from industry-wide bargaining. Production has drifted offshore in pursuit of tax credits. Moving from five studios to four touches none of those forces. Blaming consolidation for trends that long predate this deal confuses the diagnosis.
Third, the closest natural experiment points the other way. The unions cite Disney’s 2019 purchase of 20th Century Fox as the cautionary tale. But the story is messier than that. Disney trimmed its film slate before the Fox deal closed. Then the 2020 pandemic gutted theatrical releases across the entire industry. Meanwhile, Disney’s content spending has swung significantly over the past few years—starting around $24 billion in 2019, ballooning past $30 billion in 2022 as Disney built its streaming platforms, and settling back into the low-to-mid $20 billions for 2025. .
A streaming-hungry company also has reason to make more films, not fewer. Survey work by Roku and National Research Group found that the heaviest moviegoers are also the heaviest streamers. A strong theatrical run builds the awareness that drives later streaming demand. Movies fill the catalog and pull in subscribers. A firm trying to catch Netflix has every reason to keep its studios busy
When Rivals Discover Antitrust
It also pays to ask who is pushing hardest against the deal.
Netflix bid for WBD, lost to Paramount in February, and has not gone quietly. In a June 5 letter to the DOJ, Paramount accused its former rival of running a “scorched-earth campaign” to derail the transaction.
A losing bidder amplifying unions’ genuine anxieties is a familiar play. The workers’ concerns are real. Runaway production and shrinking incomes are not imagined problems. But when a rival tries to sink a competitor’s merger, self-interest often plays at least as large a role as the public interest.
For its part, Paramount has committed to releasing at least 30 films a year in theaters and has told analysts that most projected merger synergies would come from technology and back-office consolidation, not from cuts to production crews
Those promises deserve scrutiny. Matthew Belloni, who covers Hollywood’s business side at Puck and hosts The Town podcast, has been among the deal’s most persistent skeptics. He has repeatedly questioned how many jobs the merger will ultimately eliminate and whether Paramount’s synergy projections can really spare production workers.
That skepticism is warranted, and Paramount’s commitments deserve verification. At the same time, they cannot be dismissed as mere cheap talk. If the combined company hopes to catch the streaming leaders, it needs more content, not less. Expanding output is not just a public-relations talking point; it is the core of the business strategy.
Show Me the Harm
None of this means regulators should rubber-stamp the deal. If they can show, with evidence rather than a studio headcount, that the merger would suppress pay in a defined market for top creative talent, the right response would be a tailored condition—such as a fixed-term, monitored commitment on production volume or licensing.
That approach tracks what a group of former federal antitrust enforcers urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to do this winter: judge the deal by its effects on consumers and workers, favor remedies over outright prohibition, and resist structural presumptions untethered from real-world harm.
A five-to-four count in a business where one or two blockbusters can move a studio’s market share is not, by itself, a reason to stop this merger. The case against it must rest on demonstrated harm to consumers or to the people who make the content.
So far, the loudest voices have supplied a theory and a grievance. They still owe regulators the proof.
