Paramount-Warner Deal Leaves Working People On the Cutting Room Floor

From production crews to local caterers, Hollywood's mega-merger reflects the same monopoly squeeze hitting farmers, pharmacists, and grocers.

Credit: Meeno Peluce

By Alvaro Bedoya, Senior Adviser

If you’re not closely tracking Paramount’s attempted takeover of Warner Brothers, it’s easy to see it as a fight between Hollywood millionaires vs. MAGA billionaires. The media has focused on A-listers’ opposition to the deal and Paramount’s corrupt efforts to push the merger through by lavishing President Donald Trump with gifts and promises — since fulfilled — to silence his critics in the media they control.

As a result, too many people are still missing the economic devastation that this deal would almost certainly wreak upon small business owners and working people — not just in Los Angeles, but also in New York, Jersey City, Atlanta and any place where the companies have a substantial presence. This merger will lead to thousands of people losing their jobs and livelihoods.

After all, the last time David Ellison bought a media company — all the way back in 2025 — it was Paramount. In an effort to cut $3 billion in costs, he laid off thousands of people, including 20-year veterans of the company and pregnant moms on their due dates.

Now, Ellison is buying Warner Brothers Discovery for 13 times the amount he paid for Paramount, he’s loading up the combined company with almost $80 billion in debt, and he wants to cut twice the amount in “synergies” as he did when he bought Paramount.

But while film industry workers are increasingly panicked, a lot of people have no idea that this is happening. So, this past Saturday, the AELP team kicked off the Main Street vs. The Merger tour in Los Angeles, and will visit New York, and Atlanta over the next week — three cities which will be hit hard by the cuts that will follow the merger.

Instead of focusing on the Democrat vs. Republican aspects of the deal, we are focusing on what it will mean to workers and small businesses — to small production companies and caterers and independent theaters and writers and camera operators and costume designers, and everyone in between.

The full video will be up soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to share some highlights from our kickoff event at the Lumiere Cinema, an Art Deco independent theater in Los Angeles. I moderated a panel featuring writer and actor Adam Conover, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, and Writers Guild of America West President Michele Mulroney.

Right from the outset, it was clear that people were still reeling from so many other mergers that had preceded it — AT&T’s purchase of TimeWarner, Disney’s purchase of Fox, and even Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount last year.

Writer and actor Adam Conover opened with a story about what happened to his TruTV show, Adam Ruins Everything, after AT&T took over its parent company, TimeWarner.

Writer and director Tina Thompson talked about how Paramount had laid her off shortly after its purchase by Skydance. “I don’t have any prospects. My severance has run out. Unemployment is about to run out. I have not paid rent for May.” But — she clarified — she was adamant that people not feel sorry for her. She had asked to be laid off. Why? She “saw where the company was going.”

“I won’t even tell you how they treated us internally,” she said “It was horrific.”

But the writers made clear that the merger wouldn’t just hurt them – it would hurt us, the people who watch film and television. When writers have fewer buyers, they take fewer risks. When writers take fewer risks, “you will laugh less”:

Fewer risks also leads to fewer shows. And this wasn’t a hypothetical. One writer who was working on a show for CBS said that the moment the merger was announced, his work immediately slowed:

People at the event stressed that this wouldn’t be limited to television. A number of documentarians attended the event, and they explained that HBO and CNN — two Warner Brothers properties — were the last of what had once been a large ecosystem of networks who bought hard-hitting documentaries.

Matt Radecki, the owner of a post-production studio that partnered on some of the most impactful documentaries of the last two decades, including Icarus, 20 Feet from Stardom, and Navalny, explained that this ecosystem was about to go under.

The documentarians will also be squeezed on the input side, as well. My co-host, Marjan Safinia, a documentarian who is a leader at the Future Film Coalition and the International Documentary Association, warned that the merger would consolidate two of the largest sources of archival historical footage.

“It feels to us like a war to control misinformation,” Marj said.

Take a step back to consider that: This merger won’t just consolidate under Ellison’s roof all of the remaining buyers of documentaries – it’ll also consolidate the footage that provides a ground truth for historical reality.

Wannabe monopolists don’t just squeeze the people who make the products they sell. They also use their market power to squeeze the full range of vendors who are forced to do business with the powerful conglomerate (or else would be forced to go out of business).

Ted Milner, the longtime operator of a local temp agency explained that when studios merge, they “streamline” their vendors. What that means is that he has to use the conglomerate’s owned and operated background check and invoice processing vendors – and pay those vendors exorbitant amounts for the right to do business with the conglomerate:

What Mr. Milner said is eerily similar to what so many franchisees say when their franchisor is gobbled up by a private equity company. It’s also an echo of what suppliers to the A&P grocery chain said in the 1930s — we can no longer do business with the A&P without paying them kickbacks for the right to do business with them.

This is where the connections between media consolidation and the broader consolidation across the American industry start to become crystal clear. And this is what I hope the businesses and workers in Los Angeles and New York and Atlanta understand: that what’s happening to them is what’s happening to people in farming and pharmacy and grocery — and that the people in those other industries see them and recognize themselves.

Don’t take it from me, take it from soybean farmer and cattlemen Lance Lillibridge, who posted this message on Facebook a few weeks ago:

“As a farmer, watching the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger debate sounds awfully familiar.

“A handful of dominant firms get bigger, independent businesses lose leverage, and the people actually creating the product get squeezed harder and harder.

“Farmers have lived this story for decades through consolidation in inputs and retail. Now more industries are starting to see the same thing happen to them.”

AELP research director Matt Stoller and I interviewed Mr. Lillibridge alongside Peabody award-winning documentarian Kirby Dick for Organized Money recently, and the mutual recognition between the two was more than clear. This is the kind of solidarity that we can build a movement on.

You can RSVP for our New York City roundtable on June 13th here, and our June 16th Atlanta roundtable here.