Paramount CEO David Ellison said Monday that he’s “highly confident” his company will win its antitrust case and merge with Warner Bros. Discovery — as actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Alan Cumming and Benedict Wong push the UK government to block it.
Ellison told staffers in a note obtained by The Post that Paramount, home to CBS, Paramount Pictures, MTV and Nickelodeon, has complied with antitrust laws, citing various clearances from different regulatory bodies and governments.
“Over the past several months, our leadership team and legal partners have worked closely with antitrust and competition authorities around the world,” he said. “As a result regulatory bodies and governments representing 65 jurisdictions — including the European Commission, Australia, China, the US, Germany, France, Spain, Canada and South Korea — have either cleared the transaction or elected not to challenge it on cometition and/ or foreign direct investment grounds.”
Ellison added that absent the lawsuit filed by 12 US states, led by California, and a separate suit from the Writers Guild of America, Paramount would have been able to close the deal in the coming weeks.
“Let me be clear: we remain highly confident that this transaction does not pose any legal issues, and we will complete it and bring these two companies together,” he said, before acknowledging that the deal is on pause. “For not it remains business as usual.”
On Friday, Paramount agreed not to close the takeover until the court decides whether the deal violates antitrust laws. The merger deal expires on June 4, 2027 if the deal hasn’t closed by that date.
Meanwhile, actors Cumberbatch, Wong and Cumming penned an op-ed in “The Guardian” on Monday, pushing the UK government to stop the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, saying it “threatens to inflict immense harm on the British public.”
The letter, which was addressed to culture minister Lisa Nandy, said that her intervention could be “prove one of the most important decisions any culture secretary has taken for UK film, television and media in a generation.”
In the letter, which is titled, “A TV and cinema calamity could be disastrous for what you watch and what you know. Act now to stop that,” they argued that the $110 billion merger will result in “redundancies, cancelled productions, fewer films commissioned and fewer risks taken.”
The move comes after Nandy told the UK Parliament that she is “minded to intervene” in the takeover, but she has yet to make a final decision on whether to submit the union to a full public interest probe.
She is expected to reach a conclusion when Parliament returns from its summer break in September.
“Nandy has opened the door to intervention,” Cumberbatch, Cumming and Wong wrote. “She must walk through it, for the sake of everyone who makes UK television and film – and everyone who watches it. If she does not, we will be left without the ability to protect our industry and our culture from this consolidation. We must not push the public’s interest aside; we must stand up for it and block this merger.”
Some of the issues that the actors — who have all starred in big budget Marvel flicks — cited concern the livelihoods of British film and TV crews, independent film financing and the consolidation of news publications.
The merger — if approved — would combine Hollywood studios Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros., as well as streaming services Paramount+ and HBO Max and networks CBS and CNN.
Last week the European Commission approved the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, but with some conditions.
They also noted that the deal would “raise prices, shrink the number of films made and degrade the quality of what audiences see.”
