Within the movie and tv enterprise, writers are on the entrance line. We are sometimes the primary employed and the primary to expertise the harms of studio consolidation, which then impacts the initiatives that get made and what in the end reaches the general public.
As skilled writers and leaders of the Writers Guild of America East and West, the 2 unions that symbolize our nation’s movie and tv writers, we now have seen up shut the hurt that these mergers can do to our trade. That’s the reason our unions filed a lawsuit final month to dam Paramount Skydance’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Paramount has known as the merger “trade defining.” At $110.9 billion, this deal could be among the many largest transactions in leisure historical past, combining two main studios into the trade’s largest purchaser of movie and tv writing in the US.
Our opposition to this merger shouldn’t be about politics or something apart from stopping the illegal focus of market energy within the arms of 1 firm. We imagine the deal violates federal antitrust regulation and would hurt our members in addition to restrict decisions for the general public.
As we allege in our swimsuit, Paramount and Warner Bros. collectively would management 35% of writing for big-budget theatrical movies. The merged firm additionally would dominate the marketplace for tv writing expertise, turning into the most important employer of writers in episodic sequence and general offers, gaining important management over the careers and compensation of most of the trade’s most sought-after abilities.
Paramount argues that it should merge to compete in an summary market of “display screen time” that features user-produced on-line movies and social media content material. The argument makes the market appear extra aggressive than it truly is. As our criticism says, this merger is prohibited as a result of it combines two main movie and TV studios that compete for our members’ work, which corporations like YouTube and TikTok don’t do.
For writers, we don’t promote our work as display screen time. We promote particular person scripts, negotiate offers and construct careers in markets formed by a small variety of main studios that compete with one another to create the following world blockbuster or hit sequence. When a significant studio buys its direct competitor, a bidding alternative disappears, together with our leverage. This results in decrease compensation for all trade staff, inferior deal phrases and lowered programming decisions and variety for audiences.
This proposed merger is the most recent step in a decades-long wave of consolidation throughout the leisure trade, one which has left a handful of corporations accountable for an unlimited assortment of mental property, studios, networks and streaming platforms.
These corporations make billions annually off of the movies and tv sequence we write, and this consolidation has elevated their energy to seize much more of the income from our artistic labor, as we now have fewer choices to barter with.
Audiences can pay a worth as properly. Because the state attorneys common have alleged of their lawsuit to dam the deal, the merger would lead to Paramount controlling 30% of top-grossing theatrical movie distribution and result in three distributors controlling 75% of wide-release movies. Which means much less selection for American audiences and fewer shared American theatrical touchstones.
Disney’s $71.3-billion acquisition of Fox in 2019 highlights what eliminating competitors by way of company takeover can imply for writers and for audiences. Earlier than the transaction, Disney and Fox’s twentieth Century label mixed to launch a mean of 25.6 wide-release movies per 12 months, in keeping with Cinema United. After the merger, that quantity fell to only 12.6 vast releases per 12 months, even excluding the pandemic years.
David Koepp, the screenwriter behind “Jurassic Park,” “Mission: Inconceivable” and, most not too long ago, “Disclosure Day,” mentioned the results have been “rapid and categorical.” He added that the “purchaser that Fox represented didn’t migrate to Disney. It disappeared.”
The Warner Bros.-Discovery merger adopted the identical sample. In 2022, Warner Bros. justified the cope with guarantees of extra funding into unique content material and alternatives for underrepresented storytellers. As an alternative, it led to billions of {dollars} in write-downs, 1000’s of layoffs and the cancellation of quite a few movies and sequence, together with accomplished initiatives that by no means have been launched.
Paramount’s personal current historical past tells the identical story. Its 2025 acquisition of Skydance was adopted by $2 billion in price cuts and the elimination of roughly 10% of its workforce.
To promote its subsequent acquisition, Paramount has been making a brand new spherical of guarantees, together with that the deal will result in 30 theatrical movies and 170 tv sequence yearly.
These of us within the trade have heard these guarantees earlier than: A bigger firm will make investments extra, create extra and strengthen the trade. It doesn’t bear out. Consolidation has not made the roles higher on this trade, it has made them worse.
Congress enacted the Clayton Antitrust Act a century in the past to cease this type of focus earlier than it occurs. Underneath long-standing precedent, a merger of this scale and market share is presumptively unlawful. Let’s not ask our enforcers to cave to a stress marketing campaign solely to hasten the harms that may come to leisure staff. The merger of Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros.-Discovery have to be blocked.
Tom Fontana is the president of the Writers Guild of America East. Michele Mulroney is the president of the Writers Guild of America West.
