A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit from a group of consumers looking to challenge the $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Bros.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín wrote that the plaintiffs — three current Paramount+ subscribers and two prospective subscribers — presented a lack of standing in their suit. She also ruled that the plaintiffs failed to establish “cognizable” economic fallout that would invoke antitrust regulation. However, she has allowed plaintiffs to revise their complaint and refile.
“The Complaint contains a boilerplate assertion of competitive harms, such as ‘lower quality and variety’ and ‘decreased consumer choice,’ but it fails to allege any facts to plausibly show how those claimed harms have materialized or would materialize,” she wrote. She later added, “Plaintiffs’ standing theory amounts to little more than the assertion that they are consumers who watch television and go to the movies, and therefore a merger between Entertainment companies would injure them.”
Judge Martínez-Olguín will also preside over the antitrust cases from a group of 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America, which both claim the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger will do irreparable harm to the entertainment industry. Those cases are set for trial on March 2, 2027.
Paramount-Skydance CEO David Ellison recently published an op-ed in The New York Times, in which he wrote that the reason the state AGs want the merger blocked is not because of consolidation, but because he will control CNN if he’s allowed to scoop up Warner Bros. Ellison’s ties to President Donald Trump, a long time critic of CNN, and the recent troubles with “60 Minutes” have made some in Hollywood nervous about the future of the historic news network.
“I believe this fight is not really about market share,” Ellison wrote. “I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN.” Ellison, reasserting his goal of an independent CNN, added, “When it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.”