UPDATE 2: Bonta’s one clean shot just got an answer in writing. Per Bloomberg, Paramount will sign contracts with AMC and Regal guaranteeing the 30 movies a year, turning the promise he called worthless into something two theater giants can sue over.
UPDATE: The stress test is over, and the case held. The judge froze the deal, and Paramount has now agreed not to close until a full trial verdict, as late as June 2027.
Rob Bonta is the California attorney general leading the 12-state lawsuit to block Paramount from buying Warner Bros.
Monday night, hours after filing, he sat for his first tough interview about it on The Town, the Hollywood industry podcast hosted by Matthew Belloni, whose Puck newsletter is what studio executives actually read.
It did not go great. And that matters for everything we cover.
This lawsuit is the only thing standing between right now and all the dominoes my insiders have described: Gunn out, De Luca and Abdy in, the DC shakeup.
If Bonta’s case is strong, the merger freezes for months. If it’s weak, the deal closes and everything starts moving.
Monday night was the first stress test.
The Netflix Problem, Explained
Antitrust cases come down to where you draw the lines. Bonta’s lawsuit draws them around movie theaters and cable TV, and leaves Netflix, Amazon, and Apple almost completely out of it.
Belloni hit him with the numbers. Per Nielsen, the TV ratings people, 48 percent of all viewing in America is now streaming. Cable is down to 22 percent.
So Bonta is calling Paramount Plus and Warner Bros. a dangerous monopoly in the shrinking half of the business, while ignoring the giants that shrank it and continue to grow.
Bonta’s answer, boiled down: the lawsuit is about three specific markets, movies in theaters, big-budget blockbusters, and cable TV channels. Streaming isn’t one of them, so Netflix doesn’t count.
That’s the whole case in one sentence. If the judge accepts his lines, the combined studio looks like a monster and he wins.
If the judge thinks Netflix obviously counts as competition, the case falls apart.
Corrected In Real Time
Then Bonta claimed Sunday’s report was the first he had ever heard about Paramount possibly leaving California.
Belloni didn’t let it slide: “that can’t be the first time you heard it.” He noted he’d heard it himself, and Paramount has been talking to Bonta’s office for months.
Bonta’s fallback was that it just hadn’t been that explicit before. Which is a different answer.
The CNN Part He Basically Admitted
“News” is barely mentioned in the actual lawsuit.
But Bonta told Belloni the states aren’t naive about what’s happening at CBS and CNN. Asked if Ellison selling CNN would end the fight, he said no.
And after Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, “We’re trying to have CNN go on a normal path,” Bonta said the word “we” was revealing.
That’s the political war underneath the legal one, the same one we flagged in his op-ed and the same one a Paramount shareholder is now suing over.
Where Bonta Scored
Fair is fair, he landed one clean shot: promises.
Warner Bros. boss David Zaslav promised 20 movies in 2024 and released nine.
So when Ellison promises 30 movies a year, Bonta says executive promises made to get mergers approved aren’t worth the podium they’re announced from. History backs him.
The states have since made it official, putting Batgirl into their emergency court filing as proof of what those promises are worth once a merger closes.
(Update: Paramount’s answer to this exact argument arrived weeks later: the 30-movie promise is going into signed contracts with AMC and Regal. Not a podium pledge. A contract.)
But that’s an argument about trust. Cases are decided on the market lines, and that’s where he wobbled.
The Judge Twist
When the states filed, they flagged their lawsuit as related to an existing case, the Paramount+ subscriber suit already sitting with Judge Araceli MartĂnez-OlguĂn.
In that courthouse, the flag is effectively a request: give the new case to the judge who already has the old one.
Asked about her on the podcast, Bonta said “we like that judge,” since she’s already up to speed on the merger.
Then the court’s random draw handed the case to a different judge instead, P. Casey Pitts, who used to be the writers’ union’s lawyer.
Paramount cried foul, since the writers’ union is also suing to block this merger, and asked the court to move the case. Move it where? To MartĂnez-OlguĂn, the same judge the states had flagged.
Wednesday night, she officially took over the case. So the judge Bonta likes ended up with the case after all, with an assist from Paramount. Both sides now think she’s their pick. Someone is wrong.
She heard arguments on freezing the deal that Friday, and the states won their pause. Days later, both sides agreed to skip the injunction fight and head straight to a full trial. Everything at DC Studios is waiting on it.
And per my insiders, so is Warner Bros. itself. If this deal dies, the studio gets sold off in pieces and ceases to exist.
