UPDATE: Bonta’s court fight now carries a potential price tag, as Paramount is asking the judge to require the states and WGA to post a $1.88 billion bond for the costs of delaying the Warner Bros. merger. The workers Bonta says he’s fighting for just answered. Christopher Nolan’s DGA and IATSE, representing 200,000 members, sent both sides a letter urging a settlement, and unlike Bonta, they put their conditions in writing.
Rob Bonta is back with another op-ed.
The California attorney general leading the 12-state lawsuit to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger published a guest column at Deadline on Monday, his second since filing the case.
It follows his Variety op-ed featuring the Godfather jab, and this time Bonta’s message is even more direct: this is a straightforward antitrust case, Paramount’s promises don’t solve it, and he expects to win.
Bonta Says The Numbers Make The Case
Bonta says the lawsuit isn’t about whether David Ellison can be trusted. It isn’t about CNN and CBS News. And it isn’t about streaming.
His argument is that the merger violates antitrust law based on market concentration alone.
Bonta says the combined company would control nearly a third of theatrical distribution and nearly a third of basic cable channels, including 50 of the most popular.
He also points to the blockbuster market, where four distributors would control more than 90 percent of the biggest movies. According to Bonta, those films generated 88 percent of domestic box office revenue over the past four years.
His clearest example is a hypothetical involving A Minecraft Movie and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which opened back-to-back in April and May of last year — one from Warner Bros. and the other from Paramount.
If Paramount and Warner Bros. had already been one company, Bonta asks, would both movies still have been released on that schedule? Would both have received full marketing campaigns? Would both have received the same production investment?
He acknowledges nobody can know the answers.
For Bonta, that’s exactly the point. He argues the lawsuit exists to stop the industry from ever having to find out.
Bonta Dismisses Paramount’s Theater Contracts
Bonta doesn’t mention AMC or Regal by name, but the timing of the column is hard to miss.
Just days after Bloomberg reported that Paramount will put its 30-movie theatrical pledge into signed contracts with the major theater chains, Bonta argues that the loss of competition can’t be fixed with “a few one-off, piecemeal promises.”
In other words, the theater contracts don’t move him. Neither does Paramount’s proposed consent decree.
What Bonta still hasn’t said is what would move him.
There has been no specific demand, no publicly identified structural remedy, and no deal Bonta has said would satisfy the states.
So far, the answer to every concession has simply been no.
(Update: A day later, someone else named the price for him. The DGA and IATSE’s settlement letter lays out nine written conditions, including keeping the studios fully separate. It’s the first term sheet on Bonta’s desk from anyone other than Paramount.)
(Update, August 18: The theater owners have now named their price as well. Cinema United sent Bonta and Ellison four written conditions and asked them to meet — and Cinemark, which Bonta’s column was partly aimed at, came out in support of the merger.)
Bonta Has Won The Early Rounds
Fair is fair: Bonta has reason to feel confident about how the case has gone so far.
The judge granted the freeze, and the March 2027 trial date went his way as well.
But one part of his new column deserves a closer look.
Bonta argues that Paramount knows it will lose in a court of law, which is why the company is instead trying to win in the court of public opinion.
That’s an interesting complaint to make in Bonta’s second media op-ed in four weeks.
He also argues that accusations of politics don’t hold up because the case wasn’t thrown out on day one.
That’s going further than the court has.
The judge found that the states raised serious enough questions to justify freezing the merger and taking the case to trial. That’s not the same thing as ruling that Bonta is right, and the actual verdict won’t come until spring.
Ellison Is Now Forcing The Issue
Then, within hours of Bonta’s column going live, we learned exactly how David Ellison plans to answer the continued resistance.
That raises the stakes well beyond who wins an antitrust argument in court.
Bonta says he intends to win.
The question his latest column still doesn’t answer is what California ends up paying for that victory.
