UPDATE: The op-ed is now a filing, and Iowa has a partner. Iowa and Montana have asked the Supreme Court to shut down the 12-state case and rule on the merger itself.
The Paramount-Warner Bros. fight is getting a second courtroom, and Iowa wants it to be the highest one in the country.
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird says she is taking California to the Supreme Court over the 12-state lawsuit that has frozen Paramount’s $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Bird, a Republican, made the case in an August 25 op-ed for The Daily Wire, and it comes down to a head count.
Twelve states, all led by Democratic attorneys general, sued in federal court in Northern California on July 13 and had an order halting the deal a week later.
Thirty-eight states, Bird says, Republican and Democratic alike, reviewed the same evidence and declined to challenge it. And the Northern California order does not stop at the state line.
“Twelve states have overridden that judgment for the entire country, and Iowans never got a vote,” Bird wrote.
Why The Supreme Court And Not Bonta’s Courtroom
Bird’s answer is that Iowa can’t simply join the California case, and doesn’t want to.
Her argument is that California is “once again trying to be the country’s regulator,” which makes this a dispute between states, and federal law gives the Supreme Court original and exclusive jurisdiction over those.
Iowa cannot sue California in a district court, she wrote, and intervening in California’s chosen forum “raises the same problem.”
Without a Supreme Court ruling on that question, Iowa would be walking into California’s case before a judge with no authority to decide a controversy between states.
She even worked in the bacon.
“California needs to understand that it doesn’t get to decide what Americans can choose to watch or stream,” Bird wrote, comparing it to Iowa’s long-running fight with California over its Proposition 12 pork rules.
The op-ed does not give a filing date.
Bird’s only timing is that California should make its case in the one court that can bind every state, “and it should make it now, before the bill for the delay comes due.”
The $7 Million A Day Argument
The rest of the op-ed is the cost of waiting.
Starting in October, Paramount owes Warner Bros. roughly $7 million a day for as long as the deal sits in limbo, and the trial the states secured doesn’t start until March 2027.
Her point: that is money that could have gone to lower streaming prices, burned instead on a lawsuit the DOJ and 68 regulators around the world already decided was unnecessary.
She leans hard on the DOJ record: more than eight months, more than 2 million documents reviewed, interviews across the industry including the competing bidders, and a conclusion that the merger would increase competition across the media and entertainment ecosystem.
On the movie side, she notes the Department found competition intensifying rather than shrinking, with Amazon’s MGM, A24, Blumhouse, Netflix, and Apple all putting films in theaters now.
Then there are the commitments on the table: an estimated $6 billion in savings to reinvest and a public pledge to release at least 30 movies in theaters every year.
As for California’s claim that the DOJ waved the deal through as a political favor to the Ellisons, Bird’s response is the same head count, just global.
Someone, she wrote, should explain how the DOJ “managed to get approval in China, Europe, Canada, and the other 60-plus jurisdictions.” She calls the 12 states a “coalition of the unwilling” more hostile to the deal than Europe and China.
The timing is not an accident.
Bird’s op-ed landed two days after Bonta canceled the court-ordered settlement talks, accusing Paramount of leaking, and as Bloomberg reports bankers are already shopping New Line Cinema and the Warner Bros. cable channels to potential buyers. Ellison’s October 1 deadline to settle or start moving Paramount out of California is five weeks out.
And the premise Bird opens with, that Netflix dominates streaming and Paramount+ and HBO Max are each too small to catch it on their own, got a fresh data point this week: per The New York Times, Netflix is now in talks to carry Peacock and Fox One inside its own app, the storefront role Amazon has played for years.
The two services that would combine to compete with it are stuck in court until at least March.
