Paramount settles with the states and clears the last obstacle to buying Warner Bros
The deal that consolidates two of the surviving Hollywood studios cleared its final legal hurdle this week. Paramount settled lawsuits brought by California and other states, and by unions, over its acquisition of Warner Bros — reported at between $81bn and $110bn depending on how the debt is counted — and agreed as part of the settlement to produce thirty films a year or face forced divestitures. Critics in California said the state had extracted too little for allowing the combination, with reports that the attorney general had discussed a $1.5bn investment commitment as part of the talks. By Tuesday the settlements were signed and the takeover was effectively complete. The thirty-film undertaking is the interesting clause: an antitrust settlement that does not try to prevent concentration but instead specifies a minimum quantity of culture the merged company must produce, and treats the alternative — fewer, larger, safer films — as the harm worth guarding against.
