Paramount’s Trying To Pull A Fast One With $1.88B Bond Request In Antitrust Trial, State AGs, WGA Declares

Paramount believes California, New York and the other states challenging their $111 billion merger with Warner Bros Discovery should have to pony up a $1.88 billion bond to offset the  “extraordinary losses” the July 13 filed antitrust case and trial will cost the home of Top Gun.

A federal judge has set a September 24 date for a hearing on David Ellison‘s bold request, but Golden State Attorney General Rob Bonta, the Empire State’s Letitia Jame, their 10 fellow blue state AGs and the Writers Guild of America already have an answer for the Oracle scion: fuhgeddaboudit!

“Defendant Paramount Skydance seeks to extract $1.88 billion from the public and a non-profit labor union to underwrite the costs of two private contracts it entered willfully, with advice of counsel, and for its own benefit,” the AGs and the WGA state in an opposition filed Monday in federal court in Oakland over the bond. Para are also seeking to rewrite a “stipulation to voluntarily refrain from closing the merger, which Paramount itself proposed, negotiated, and then presented to this Court for signature.” 

“Whatever regret Paramount may feel for its commitments to Warner Bros., to Plaintiff States, to the WGA,1 and to the Court, it cannot show that the Court acted ‘improvidently’ in signing the joint stipulation,” the AGs and WGA note. “Nor can Paramount show why the public or a non-profit labor union should underwrite its acquisition of Warner Bros.” 

Recommendation from the states and the scribes to Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin: “The Court should deny Paramount’s motion and decline to modify the stipulation to require a bond,”

At the very end of the opposition filing they add a cheeky kicker: “In the alternative, if the Court grants Paramount’s motion, it should impose a nominal bond of $10,000.”

Ouch!

So much for the “extraordinary losses” of the $7 million a day ticking fee to WBD shareholders that kicks on at the end of the month. So much for potential regulatory and break-up costs that could emerge before the March 2, 2027 trial. So much for the whole premise of Paramount’s bond request — that $10,000 would barely cover the monthly coffee order of Para and WBD brass.

Having gone into media lockdown mode last week after accusations from Bonta that it was Para leaks that scuttled a planned August 24 settlement meeting (more like chat), the Melrose lot did not reply to Deadline’s request Tuesday for comment on the latest filing.

As the parties await the September 24 hearing on the bond motion, the high-profile move last week by red state AGs from Iowa and Montana to take the Dissenting Dozen to the Supreme Court to stop their antitrust thrust sits in docket purgatory, for now.

While SCOTUS ponders to take up Iowa and Montana’s desire for an October hearing on the so-called “politicized antitrust enforcement by a small handful of states,” it is now one month until Paramount’s alleged Decision Day on whether the company will exit California. Never actually confirmed by Para and part of Bonta’s claims that the company is engaging in “blackmail” tactics in the court of public opinion, word is Ellison is considering the pastures of Texas, Georgia or Tennessee if he can’t get settlement talks going by October 1.

As pols, cinema chains and exhibitors and failed L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt push for things to be worked out in the boardroom, not the courtroom, Para and the AGs are both very much aware of a recent L.A. Board of Supervisors report that warns of possible big layoffs if ParaBros comes to be. In its second such analysis in as many months, the country’s Department of Economic Opportunity also predicts that the media merger could cost the region billions in wages and hundreds of millions in tax revenue.