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A meeting that might have cooled one of the biggest legal fights in entertainment fell apart before it could begin. California Attorney General Rob Bonta called off a session with representatives of Paramount Skydance Corporation (NASDAQ: PSKY) today, the media company trying to buy the parent of HBO, CNN, and one of Hollywood’s oldest film studios. His reason was blunt. He accused the company of leaking and twisting details of an earlier conversation and said it had shown a lack of good faith.
At the center of all this is a proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. (NASDAQ: WBD), valued at roughly $110 billion once assumed debt is counted. Paramount has offered $31.00 in cash for each WBD share, a price that already survived a bidding contest earlier this year. If the deal closes, it would fold together two of the oldest studios in film, along with a long list of cable channels and streaming platforms, creating a company large enough to unsettle regulators.
Those regulators are not federal this time. The U.S. Justice Department cleared the merger earlier this year. The challenge instead comes from a coalition of 12 state attorneys general, all Democrats, led by Bonta. Their lawsuit, filed in July, argues that a combined Paramount and WBD would control close to a third of wide-release movie distribution and a similar share of basic cable programming. That level of concentration, they say, would violate the Clayton Antitrust Act, a law more than a century old that blocks deals judged to harm competition.
Bonta has not ruled out a deal to end the case. He told CNBC last week that he would rather settle in a boardroom than fight in a courtroom, and he called the antitrust claims clear cut. But he has attached a heavy condition. Any resolution, he has said, would require robust structural remedies, meaning Paramount would likely have to sell off or spin out parts of the business rather than simply promise to behave. That is a high bar, and it helps explain why the talks were fragile from the outset.
Timing is where the money bites. Paramount has agreed to hold off closing the purchase until as late as June 2027, and a trial is set for March. Delay is costly. Starting after September 30, the company owes WBD shareholders a fee of $0.25 per share each quarter, which works out to about $7 million a day. Frustrated by the wait, Paramount recently asked the court to make the states post a $1.88 billion bond to cover those costs. The company has also hinted it could pull operations out of California, which added political pressure to an already tense situation.
The immediate trigger was trust. The two sides met on Friday, and Bonta says the substance of that private meeting was leaked and then described inaccurately in public. He canceled the Monday session late on Sunday and said his office would return only once Paramount, in his words, stopped playing games. Both Paramount and WBD have not commented, and neither has publicly disputed his version of events in any detail.
Underneath the legal maneuvering, this is really a story about how much of what people watch could soon sit under one roof. Media companies have spent years combining to compete with streaming giants, and each new pairing invites sharper questions about choice and cost. For a reader who does not follow Hollywood deal making, the point is straightforward. A very large purchase is now caught in a legal and political fight that could stretch into 2027, cost real money by the day, and finish either with major concessions or with no deal at all. Monday’s cancelled meeting settled nothing, yet it showed just how far apart the two sides still stand.
