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Paramount has agreed to a request from 12 states to link their federal antitrust case to a pre-existing suit brought by Paramount+ subscribers.
The move means that the states’ challenge to the $111 billion merger with
Warner Bros. Discovery will likely end up before Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a Biden appointee who is already handling the earlier lawsuit.
Martinez-Olguin, whose courtroom is in Oakland, worked for the National Immigration Law Center and the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project before being nominated to the bench in 2023.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the state coalition in filing the suit on Monday in the Northern District of California. The states are also asking for a temporary restraining order and an injunction that would prevent the merger from closing. No hearing has yet been scheduled on that motion.
On Monday, Bonta’s office filed a motion to relate the case to a lawsuit filed in April by Paramount+ subscribers who alleged that the merger would harm competition and drive up prices. The state argued that it would be more efficient to have one judge consider both suits.
“We like that judge,” Bonta told The Town podcast on Monday. “The fact that the judge is already up to speed, is thinking about this, thinking about its impacts — we like that.”
Paramount filed a motion Tuesday joining in the states’ request. A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment.
Martinez-Olguin is scheduled to hold a hearing on Thursday on the subscribers’ motion for a preliminary injunction and on Paramount’s motion to dismiss the subscribers’ suit.
Earlier Tuesday, the states’ case was randomly assigned to Judge P. Casey Pitts, another Biden appointee who, while a private attorney, represented the Writers Guild of America in its fight over agency packaging fees in 2019. The WGA is among the suit’s strongest supporters. Pitts, whose courtroom is in San Jose, likely will not have the case for long.
Pitts is already overseeing another high-profile antitrust action that has several parallels with the Paramount-Warner Bros. suit. In that case, 12 states and the District of Columbia are seeking to block the $14 billion merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks, which the Trump Department of Justice approved last year.
In January, Pitts denied the states’ motion to halt the merger pending the outcome of the challenge, finding that the two companies had already spent several months integrating their operations. A final ruling on that case is still pending.
In the WGA lawsuit, Pitts was part of the Altshuler Berzon legal team that accused WME of collecting illegal fees from studios for packaging clients into projects. In that case, he squared off against Jeffrey Kessler, the high-powered litigator who is now leading Paramount’s defense of the Warner Bros. merger.
The WGA won a war of attrition in that case, with WME and other agencies ultimately agreeing to swear off packaging fees and to divest themselves of their content production entities.
