Twelve Democratic-Led States Sue to Block Paramount's $111 Billion Warner Bros. Takeover
The antitrust suit, led by California's attorney general, defies the Justice Department's approval and seeks to stop what one official called the largest merger in Hollywood history.
A coalition of 12 Democratic-led states filed an antitrust lawsuit on Monday to block Paramount Skydance's $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, directly defying the Justice Department, which cleared the deal last month. The suit sets up a rare clash between state prosecutors and the Trump administration over one of the biggest media mergers ever proposed.
The states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington — are all represented by Democratic attorneys general. California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the coalition, calling the combination the largest in Hollywood history and warning that it would extinguish competition, raise prices and lower the quality of what audiences can watch.
At the heart of the complaint is the claim that the transaction violates the Clayton Act by lessening competition in three distinct markets: wide-release theatrical distribution, "top-grossing" theatrical distribution and basic cable licensing. If combined, the coalition argues, Paramount and Warner Bros. would control nearly a third of cable programming and more than a third of the country's blockbuster films — leverage the states say could reshape what gets made and how much consumers pay to see it.
The coalition said it asked the two companies not to close the merger until the judicial process concludes, and it signaled it would seek a temporary restraining order to freeze the deal in place. That maneuver could delay a transaction the companies had hoped to complete quickly after winning federal sign-off, and it raises the prospect of a drawn-out court fight playing out in multiple jurisdictions.
A Paramount Skydance spokesperson pushed back forcefully, saying the lawsuit "reflects a fundamentally flawed application of the antitrust laws and is wrong on both the facts and the law." The company has argued that the media landscape is now dominated by streaming giants and that scale is necessary to compete. The states counter that consolidating two of the last major Hollywood studios would hand a single owner outsized control over theaters, cable bundles and the pipeline of major releases.
The case also underscores a widening rift between Democratic state officials and federal antitrust regulators under President Trump, whose Justice Department approved the deal in June. With billions of dollars and the shape of the entertainment industry at stake, the fight over the Paramount-Warner combination is likely to become a defining test of how far states can go to police mergers their federal counterparts have already blessed.
Originally reported by CBS News.