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The Writers Guild of America is piling on in the effort to immediately stop Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Early Wednesday, the union filed a motion seeking a preliminary injunction to bar Paramount
and WBD from “closing or consummating” their merger or “taking any steps to integrate or consolidate their operations.”
Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin issued a temporary restraining order on Monday, blocking the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal from closing at least until Aug. 3. The order came at the request of a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general that argues the deal will harm competition in the basic cable and theatrical distribution markets.
The states, led by California, are also seeking a preliminary injunction that would halt the deal indefinitely, until a trial is held on the merits on their case.
After the states sued last week, the WGA filed its own suit, alleging that the merger will also reduce writers’ pay and undermine competition in three labor markets: blockbuster scripts, writing for episodic shows and writers’ overall deals.
The motion for an injunction includes statements from several top TV and film writers — including David Koepp, Adam McKay and Mike Schur — who say they have seen the effects of industry consolidation firsthand over the course of their careers.
McKay and Koepp described bidding wars for scripts that took place some 20 years ago, and said that that sort of intense competition no longer exists. In 2001, Koepp sold “Panic Room” to Sony after a competition that included Universal and Paramount.
“If I brought the same script to market today, I would have meaningfully fewer options,” Koepp wrote. “The universe of studios capable of making a glossy, star-driven film at a healthy budget has contracted to only a handful of companies.”
McKay also discussed bidding wars for “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights,” saying that such competition belongs to a bygone era.
“This is because there are now far fewer studios in the market than when I first began screenwriting in the early 2000s,” he wrote. “Had I brought the same ‘Anchorman’ script to market today, it is very unlikely that it would be made at all… The remaining studios today are no longer independent creative entities. They are divisions of massive conglomerates with political exposure and financial relationships extending far beyond the entertainment industry.”
Schur described his attempts to sell a TV show in 2017 with Aubrey Plaza playing a therapist who is also a con artist. He said that several streamers were open to the project, but were facing pressure to finance projects from their own in-house studios, so the deal did not work out.
“I had never experienced this before, and it signaled to me that something fundamental had broken in the market,” he wrote.
He also stated that the market for overall deals has shrunk significantly in recent years.
“This is at least in part because the competitive pressure that once incentivized studios to pay for exclusivity has been replaced by a market in which exclusivity is in effect already guaranteed by the consolidation itself, not because the work writers provide has become less valuable,” Schur wrote.
The writers also cited Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets, arguing that Fox’s independent creative voice has essentially been subsumed by Disney’s corporate imperatives.
The WGA suit differs from the states’ case in that it focuses on labor markets, rather than distribution markets. In its motion for an injunction, the union cites the case of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, a merger that was blocked because it would lower advances for book authors.
“This logic applies with equal force here,” the union’s attorneys argue. “The proposed Merger would reduce competition between buyers of film and television writing services, suppressing writers’ compensation, eroding deal terms, and diminishing the volume and diversity of programming reaching audiences.”
Ultimately, the WGA argues that the deal “threatens to forge a cultural monolith and shrink the marketplace of ideas through corporate concentration.”
“When a handful of executives control which stories are financed, whose voices are platformed, and which programming reaches an audience, they exercise a form of economic and cultural power that the antitrust laws were designed to restrain,” the motion states.
Paramount has argued that the merger will be good for writers because the combined company will produce more movies and TV shows. It has also pledged that the companies’ brands will remain under independent creative leadership.
