Following a stunning reveal by Axios, Variety has confirmed a late-breaking entry for most unbelievable news story of the year (or perhaps “most depressingly believable news story of the year”): Warner Bros. Discovery has met with Paramount about a potential merger of the two super-huge media companies. Axios says that WBD’s market value is more than double Paramount’s, so “any merger would not be of equals”—which is to say that WBD would be consuming the deep-in-debt Paramount the way the evil robot Unicron consumes planets in the 2023 Paramount-owned movie Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts.
Axios has pertinent details about how this is all going down, but it’s worth highlighting that these are just talks and no deals have actually been made yet (and maybe won’t ever be made). Still, the idea of a WBD/Paramount merger is fascinating—and just a little horrifying—so there’s a lot to think about here even on the consumer side.
For example, Axios notes that Paramount has a strong library of kids content thanks to the fact that it owns Nickelodeon, and a deal like this would put SpongeBob under the same roof as Bugs Bunny (assuming infamous WBD boss David Zaslav doesn’t kill Bugs before that happens). But even beyond stuff for kids, since both WBD and Paramount own their own streaming services (Max and Paramount+, respectively), those platforms could be combined into some kind of behemoth (ParaMax+?) that would be a serious competitor to Netflix and Disney+... while removing even more opportunities for consumer choice and putting even more shows and movies in danger of Zaslav and WBD’s terrible cost-cutting axe.
Because therein lies the dark side of a deal like this: As these companies consolidate, the entertainment world gets a little smaller and there become fewer and fewer opportunities for art to get made. You just have to look at the brief history of Warner Bros. Discovery’s existence to see proof of that. Two big companies merged, and the legacy they’ve built since then has been all about cravenly saving money by any means necessary.
But, on the other hand, Axios points out that WBD-owned Turner Sports and Paramount-owned CBS Sports currently share broadcasting duties for March Madness, so combining those two brands into one company would streamline things for college basketball fans. So that’s cool.