Paramount Skydance completed its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery today, after a last-ditch effort to block the deal was rejected by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.
The post-merger company is called Skydance, taking the name of a firm that Paramount bought in a separate deal last year. The new Skydance combines two of the largest movie studios, streaming services Paramount+ and HBO Max, CBS, CNN, “and a portfolio of live sports including CBS Sports and TNT Sports, as well as a deep programming library and expansive collection of brands and franchises,” Skydance said today in a press release announcing completion of the deal.
The merger was delayed a bit by a lawsuit filed by California and 11 other states. In July, US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in the Northern District of California ruled that the combination would likely reduce competition substantially and violate antitrust laws.
California settled the lawsuit last month, and the other states involved went along with the compromise. A coalition of free speech and media advocacy groups urged the judge to reject the settlement, saying it will give residents of the states that sued Paramount “virtually nothing.”
Martínez-Olguín approved the settlement on September 30, saying the deal “represents a reasonable factual and legal resolution of the dispute.” She wrote that a typical settlement “does not fully remediate an alleged violation or even necessarily resolve the ultimate factual and legal issues of a case.” It “reflects a compromise of the claims short of full adjudication—compromise that may leave some dissatisfaction for both sides and the public but a compromise that saves the risk, time, and expense of litigating through trial.”
The settlement addresses the lawsuit’s complaints about film distribution “by requiring certain minimum thresholds of investment and release of domestic films,” and addresses complaints about licensing of basic cable channels with “requirements for continued, separate negotiations of distribution for the two entities’ basic cable holdings,” the judge wrote. Objections based on “hopes and desires for the proposed consent decree to reach farther—to achieve more—do not rise to the level of legal violations upon which the Court can reject the parties’ negotiated resolution,” she wrote.