UPDATE 2: The play worked. Per the WSJ, Governor Newsom’s office is now urging Bonta to settle the lawsuit, warning that blocking the merger costs California jobs. The jobs argument Ellison built in Washington is now coming out of Sacramento.
UPDATE: Now the opposition is trying to litigate it. A Paramount shareholder has sued the Ellisons and the entire board, alleging the Washington relationship amounts to an illegal side deal with Trump. Paramount denies it.
Rob Bonta ended Monday with a lawsuit. David Ellison ended it at dinner in Washington.
Per Variety, the Paramount Skydance CEO has been quietly backing a bill to create a first-ever federal film tax incentive, with support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Ellison has spent at least six months in exploratory meetings on the legislation, and on Monday evening, the same day 12 states sued to block his $110 billion Warner Bros. takeover, he was in D.C. breaking bread with top Republican leadership, general counsel Makan Delrahim at his side. Politico’s Daniel Miller first reported Ellison’s interest.
Think about the split screen.
Monday gave us the Godfather op-ed, the scathing Paramount response, dueling accusations about who’s really protecting the movie business, and it closed with California’s AG holding a press conference about Hollywood jobs while the man he’s suing sat in Washington working on an actual Hollywood jobs bill.
What the bill would do
There is no national film incentive. California’s program tops out at $750 million, and it’s been losing the war anyway, as productions keep fleeing to rebates in the UK, Canada, Australia, and Eastern Europe.
A federal incentive would stack on top of state programs, giving producers a reason to shoot in America again, and it would sweeten the pot most in Hollywood’s home state.
Which means, as Variety’s sources couldn’t help noting, Ellison spent Monday night working on financial relief for the very state whose attorney general sued him that morning.
This is the Voight plan
Nobody should be surprised at the idea’s origin.
Trump named Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone his special ambassadors to revive Hollywood, and the plan Voight delivered to the White House had a federal film tax incentive at its center.
That proposal is now a bipartisan bill with a mogul quietly pushing it through six months of meetings.
And it’s no mystery which mogul Washington prefers.
Trump made clear where he stood in the Warner Bros. bidding war and wanted a Netflix takeover stopped.
Ellison’s man in the room, Delrahim, is Trump’s former DOJ antitrust chief, the official who sued to block AT&T–Time Warner, the last Warner mega-merger, now defending this one.
Say what you want about the optics; everyone in this fight is playing Washington, and Ellison is simply better at it.
Even his skeptics want what he’s selling
Here’s the detail that makes this more than lobbying theater: Hollywood’s unions are on the same side.
The Director’s Guild of America (DGA), headed by Christopher Nolan, just wrote into its new contract that top studio executives must lobby for domestic filming incentives, and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and SAG-AFTRA have taken up the federal push.
These are the same labor groups that remain cool on the merger itself, yet on the incentive, they’re standing with Ellison.
That’s the pattern with this Paramount-WBD regime.
It keeps the receipts on what audiences actually want, it’s part of an industry-wide 180 degree turn toward the fans Hollywood spent a decade shunning, and Netflix keeps proving the Warner Bros. buy was the right call.
Bonta’s lawsuit says the merger kills jobs and choices. Ellison’s answer, delivered over dinner in D.C.: a bill that would fund both.
One of them filed a complaint about saving Hollywood. The other one is writing the legislation. Audiences — and voters — tend to notice who shows up with the check.
