The completion of Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros Discovery creates a media giant controlling CBS, HBO Max and vast film libraries, deepening the concentration of cultural power in very few hands
Another Giant Is Born
The merger is done. Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros Discovery, agreed in February, has been completed, creating a combined company renamed Skydance, with a deal value reported at around 110 billion dollars. As LBC reported in its account of Paramount and Warner Bros wrapping up the mega deal to create Skydance, the new group brings together CBS and HBO Max with film franchises including Harry Potter, Top Gun and The Godfather. In Britain, it will control Channel 5 and TNT Sports. David Ellison, Skydance’s chairman and chief executive, called it a historic day for the entire industry.
Historic it is. But history is not always made for the benefit of the people living through it.
A Pattern Of Concentration
The American media and entertainment industry has been consolidating for decades. A handful of conglomerates now control an extraordinary share of what Americans watch, read and hear. Each merger is justified with the same language: scale, efficiency, competitiveness in a streaming market dominated by technology giants. Ellison said the ambition was to create a stronger competitor. The question is: stronger for whom?
For shareholders, mergers promise cost savings, which is to say job cuts, along with greater pricing power. For executives, they bring larger empires and larger pay packages. For workers, they routinely mean layoffs, as overlapping departments are merged and redundancies identified. For viewers, they can mean fewer choices, higher subscription prices and more content tailored to the safest commercial formulas. For creators, they mean fewer buyers for their work and more leverage for the companies that remain.
New York’s Stake
This is a New York story as much as a Hollywood one. CBS is headquartered in Manhattan. Warner Bros Discovery and its predecessor companies have employed thousands of people in the city, across news, production, advertising, technology and administration. Every past round of media consolidation has brought job losses to New York’s creative and media workforce. Writers, editors, producers, camera operators, engineers and support staff have seen their roles merged, outsourced or eliminated.
The unions that represent these workers, from the writers’ and actors’ guilds to the crafts and technical unions, have fought hard in recent years to secure protections, including over artificial intelligence and streaming residuals. A larger, more concentrated employer has more power at the bargaining table. That is not an accident. It is part of the point.
The Newsroom Question
Consolidation in entertainment is troubling. Consolidation in news is dangerous. CBS News is one of the most important journalistic institutions in the country. When news organizations are absorbed into vast conglomerates whose primary interests lie elsewhere, in film franchises, sports rights and streaming subscriptions, journalism can become a cost centre to be managed rather than a public trust to be protected. Owners with political and commercial interests may, consciously or not, shape what is covered and how. A democracy needs many independent sources of news, not a few corporate ones.
Laughing At The Megadeal
American humour has already found the absurdity in the deal. Bohiney’s headline, that Paramount completed its takeover of Warner Bros, renamed the combined company Skydance and the audience asked if the movies will still be late, captures the bewilderment many viewers feel. The numbers in different reports vary depending on what is counted, but the essential reality is the same: two of the oldest names in American entertainment are now one company, and the audience was never consulted.
What Regulation Should Do
Antitrust law in the United States was built to prevent precisely this kind of concentration of economic power. For much of the past half century, enforcement weakened, shaped by an ideology that judged mergers almost solely by their effect on short-term consumer prices. That approach ignored the effect of consolidation on workers, on creators, on independent businesses and on democracy itself. A stronger antitrust policy would look at all of these, and would treat the concentration of media and cultural power as a public concern, not a private transaction.
State and local governments have a role too. New York can attach conditions to tax credits for film and television production, ensuring that companies benefiting from public subsidies maintain jobs, respect unions and support local production. It can strengthen protections for workers facing layoffs. And it can invest in public and independent media that do not answer to shareholders.
Culture Is Not A Commodity
The films, shows and news that a society produces are not just products. They are how it tells stories about itself, argues about its values and imagines its future. When a handful of corporations control that process, the range of stories narrows to those that serve their interests. Skydance may make many good films and shows. It will also, inevitably, make decisions based on what its shareholders want, not what the public needs.
The response should not be nostalgia for the old studio system, which had its own abuses. It should be a demand for a media landscape that is diverse, accountable and democratic, with strong unions, independent producers, public broadcasting and real competition. The completion of this merger is a reminder of how far we are from that, and how urgently we need to change course.