| Hollywood has suffered through a decade of failed mergers. Companies including Disney, Comcast and two different owners of Warner Bros. have spent billions of dollars, fired thousands of workers and spent years restructuring — all while losing ground to Netflix and YouTube. David Ellison is eager to prove he can break the cycle. After acquiring Paramount just a month ago, he has now hired financial advisers to prepare a bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal would combine two of Hollywood’s oldest studios, as well as dozens of cable networks, two news organizations, two sports heavyweights and two major streaming services. Investors celebrated the news. Shares of both companies spiked on Thursday and rose again on Friday. That’s pretty rare. Typically the company receiving the bid soars, while shares of the buyer head lower. Yet Wall Street sees benefits for both sides. Paramount is built on cable networks like MTV and Nickelodeon that, while profitable now, are in terminal decline. Ellison can’t spin them off – as Warner Bros. hopes to do with channels like TNT and TBS – because he’d be left with a small company that makes no money. Paramount’s film division has been losing money and its streaming service is essentially at breakeven. With Warner Bros., Ellison could press ahead with that company’s spinoff plan, throw in Paramount’s cable networks and offload debt to the new company. That would leave him with two major studios – Paramount and Warner Bros. – and two major streaming services, Paramount+ and HBO Max. Ellison could combine the streaming brands, creating one megaservice with the best library in the world, as well as new programming from HBO, Taylor Sheridan and more. “The potential combination of Paramount+ and HBO Max would create an extremely formidable competitor in streaming,” Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich wrote in a note on Friday. This sounds like a great strategy, yet it raises several questions, starting with an obvious one: Why now? Warner Bros. has been inviting offers for awhile. Unlocking value for investors was a big reason for its decision to split off its cable networks — separating assets with a limited future from the more enticing studio and streaming businesses. Bankers have been pitching Ellison on Warner Bros. Discovery since before he closed his deal for Paramount. Ellison could have waited to execute his plans for his renamed Paramount Skydance and see where things stood in a year or two. Warner Bros. might be cheaper if he waited. Even with the recent run-up in the shares, Warner Bros. is down 31% from the high set in April 2022, when the current incarnation of the company first started trading. Yet if he waited, he would risk running into a different regulatory regime. It’s hard to predict what the current administration will or won’t investigate. A Paramount-Warner Bros. marriage would be a merger of two giants in the same industry – the kind of deal that invites regulatory scrutiny. Ellison would be combining two of the largest owners of cable networks in the world, accounting for more than 13% of all TV viewing and a far larger share on traditional TV. The Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission will have questions. Ellison would also be buying CNN. The last time someone offered to buy CNN, the Trump administration tried to block the deal. “I don’t know if the government will allow this,” Raymond Sfeir, director of the Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University in Orange, California, told Bloomberg. “It’s already a very concentrated industry to start with, and now you’ll have even more concentration.” Many Wall Street analysts have assessed that Ellison could get a Warner Bros. deal approved, as evidenced by his success completing the takeover of Paramount. While the Trump administration did hold up the deal for months — and it was, by comparison, a simple deal — the Ellison family never seemed too worried about the deal being approved. Waiting would also allow other interested parties to make a play for part of Warner Bros. The list of likely buyers for the full company is short. Companies like Netflix and Apple don’t want cable networks. Despite persistent rumors about Comcast and Warner Bros., a merger of those two would face serious hurdles. Comcast stockholders don’t want their company to invest in more cable networks. That’s one reason management is divesting channels like USA and CNBC. The Trump administration would be far more likely to approve a deal with Ellison than Comcast, which owns MSNBC. Will this help Paramount compete?A lot of media mergers make sense on paper. Analysts and industry executives have spent the past decade calling for consolidation to help legacy media companies compete with technology giants. In that span, Viacom merged with CBS to form Paramount. Fox sold its entertainment assets to Disney. Time Warner was sold to AT&T and then to Discovery, which had previously acquired Scripps. Amazon bought MGM. Would you call any of these deals a roaring success? Integration is difficult. Companies spend years figuring out the right structure and leadership. Disney cycled through CEOs and faced an activist shareholder following its Fox deal. Warner Bros. is on the block for a third time. Netflix, which has resisted doing big deals, has taken advantage of the chaos at its competition. It has used the last decade to race ahead on execution. Is another studio going away?Ellison is new blood with lots of capital and a strong team whose arrival has raised spirits in Hollywood. But would he have better odds spending $10 billion to improve the company he just bought or $40 billion to buy Warner Bros.? Read More: Paramount-Warner Bros. Combo Would Add to LA Job Market Woes Merging two studios will mean fewer jobs and fewer buyers of movies and TV shows. Ellison rescued Paramount from years of decline under the Redstone family and has started spending big money. But when you combine two companies, overall spending goes down. That’s why executives racing to the altar boast about synergies and efficiencies. Ellison is using his family’s considerable financial resources to pursue a deal that would make him one of the most powerful media moguls in the world. Whether it would benefit his company or the industry is an open question. The best of Screentime (and other stuff) | The music industry’s ‘record’ year | The music business is having another record year, according to its foremost representative in Washington. The leading data collector for live music said the same. Yet dig beneath the numbers and you’ll see another story. The industry grew less than 1% in the first half of 2025, the slowest pace in a decade. The top 100 tours have grossed an additional 2.3% through three quarters, compared with a year ago. (Pollstar began measuring its year at the end of 2024.) The numbers are better than they were at midyear, when average ticket prices were in decline. (It’s now up about 1.5%.) But it’s still the slowest rate since the pandemic. The music industry is in a better position financially than many other sectors of entertainment. But the streaming boom is over and the post-pandemic live-events boom is slowing big time. YouTube’s first NFL gameAbout 17 million people watched YouTube’s week one NFL game. That’s an increase over the Brazil game on Peacock last year, but well below Netflix's Christmas Day game. The big surprise (to me) was that it only attracted about 1 million viewers abroad. It was in the middle of the night in many markets and wasn’t promoted as much outside the US. But this is a service with more than 2 billion users... Still, the stream worked. The game was good. The NFL is happy. The No. 1 movie in the world is…Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle. The latest film in the franchise, based on popular manga, grossed $70 million in the US and Canada this weekend — more than twice the previous record for an anime film. It has already grossed more than $300 million worldwide thanks to its popularity in Japan and a few other Asian markets. The US is slowly losing its monopoly on global franchises. The No. 1 album in the world is…Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend. The album delivered the biggest streaming week of Carpenter’s career, landing several songs in the global top 10. Deals, deals, dealsCheck out the hardcore band Turnstile on Tiny Desk. | 
