By Dawn Chmielewski and Jody Godoy
LOS ANGELES, June 6 (Reuters) – As he spoke at a gathering on Saturday to protest Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, stand-up comedian Adam Conover framed the ongoing media consolidation as an existential threat to an industry that made the United States a cultural power.
“It’s about to die, and that’s why I feel so passionately about this issue,” he said.
Conover was a featured speaker on Saturday at an event billed as the first stop in a three-city “Main Street vs. The Merger” tour bringing together entertainment workers, small business owners and politicians who oppose Paramount Skydance’s plan to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion transaction.
About 100 people gathered at Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles for the event, which was organized by advocacy groups, the Writers Guild of America and industry workers who wanted to voice their concerns about the merger.
U.S. antitrust regulators appear poised to approve the combination, amid assurances from Paramount Skydance that the deal would not hurt other studios or creative talent. CEO David Ellison has pledged that the combined Paramount and Warner studios would stay productive by releasing at least 30 films a year.
A Paramount spokesperson issued a statement saying the merged companies would have “every economic incentive” to expand production of the quality content that consumers demand.
“Opposing this deal means opposing expanded consumer choice, new opportunities for creators and workers, and greater competition throughout the creative ecosystem — the opposite of what antitrust law is meant to achieve,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
But a group of U.S. states including California and New York are preparing a lawsuit to block the deal, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.
Conover knows firsthand the toll of cost-cutting from media mergers. After AT&T’s 2018 acquisition of Time Warner, his TruTV show “Adam Ruins Everything” was canceled, putting employees, “countless” contractors and more than 100 others out of work.
The job losses reflect an entertainment industry where employment has declined since its peak in late 2022.
California has been especially hard hit, shedding 17,234 positions from 2019 through 2023, according to the Milken Institute. It concluded that a combination of factors — including shrinking television ad revenue and stagnating streaming growth — convinced studios to look for less-expensive places to make movies and series.
The occupancy rate in Hollywood’s sound stages has fallen to 62% in the first half of 2025, down from nearly full occupancy in 2016, according to Film LA, the non-profit organization that coordinates filming in greater Los Angeles. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents 170,000 behind-the-scenes professionals, has said its members worked about 36% fewer hours than in 2022.
Matt Radecki, a co-founder of the Different by Design post-production facility in Los Angeles, fears a Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger will result in fewer buyers for documentary films such as the Oscar-winning “Navalny,” which was produced by two Warner units, HBO Max and CNN Films.
“This is the biggest thing that we’ve faced,” Radecki told attendees on Saturday. “The places we work with are closed … They’re gone, and they’re never coming back, and we don’t want to see that happen to HBO or CNN or CNN Films.”
Former Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya expressed optimism that California Attorney General Rob Bonta could block the merger. Bonta could argue that the Paramount Skydance-Warner deal lessens competition among film studios, thereby indirectly affecting workers.
But it is also possible in the U.S. to block a merger by arguing it would decrease competition for specific types of labor. Antitrust authorities did so once before, in the case of publisher Penguin Random House’s bid to buy rival Simon & Schuster in 2022.
California could point to that precedent in any labor-focused challenge, said Ioana Marinescu, a University of Pennsylvania economist who wrote the Biden-era Justice Department’s guidelines on labor market issues.
“For some workers it could be that jobs at these two companies are really special, and this is really what they want,” she said. “And there isn’t necessarily a very close substitute. And those are the people for whom it’s going to make an adverse impact.”
(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles and Jody Godoy in New York; Editing by Edmund Lee, Sergio Non, Franklin Paul and Nick Zieminski)
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