Business
Hollywood stars line up against Paramount’s Warner Bros. acquisition
A constellation of stars are lining up against Paramount’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, expressing fears the blockbuster merger would devastate the industry and shrink production jobs.
The letter was signed by nearly 1,000 artists and movie creators, including such big names as Ben Stiller, Bryan Cranston, Noah Wyle, Joaquin Phoenix, Kristen Stewart and Jane Fonda, whose Committee for the First Amendment helped organize the campaign.
“This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries — and the audiences we serve — can least afford it,” according to the letter. “The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”
Paramount, in a statement, pushed back against the artists’ concerns. Tech scion David Ellison and his team believes the blockbuster deal makes sense — particularly because of turmoil in the entertainment business, the company said.
“This is also a moment when the industry has been facing significant disruption—and the need for strong, creative-first and well-capitalized companies that can continue to invest in storytelling has never been greater,” Paramount said.
The Hollywood workforce has shrunk by more than 42,000 jobs between 2022 and 2024, according to a recent study. The economy has not bounced back following shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the twin labor strikes three years ago.
Thousands of film workers have been searching for work — but many of the big opportunities have moved abroad.
The strikes prompted studio executives to reset their output after previously spending big to build streaming services to compete with Netflix.
Two other consolidations led to widespread cutbacks: Walt Disney Co.’s acquisition of Fox entertainment assets in 2019, and Discovery’s takeover of AT&T’s WarnerMedia four years ago.
The resulting entity — Warner Bros. Discovery, led by David Zaslav — instituted deep cost cuts and thousands of layoffs to cut expenses because the firm was nearly drowning in deal debt — $43 billion — from the day Zaslav took the helm.
Paramount’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros. would result in a significantly higher debt load, $79 billion in debt, prompting concerns from the group and others about further downsizing.
Ellison, the 43-year-old son of billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is leading the effort to buy Warner Bros. Discovery to prop up Paramount, which the family acquired in August.
In late February, Ellison’s Paramount Skydance prevailed in a nearly six-month bidding war after Netflix unexpectedly bowed out when the elder Ellison agreed to financially back his son’s $111-billion deal.
“We have been clear in our commitments to do just that: increasing output to a minimum of 30 high-quality feature films annually with full theatrical releases, continuing to license content, and preserving iconic brands with independent creative leadership,” Paramount said, adding that such promises should ensure that “creators have more avenues for their work, not fewer.”
Warner shareholders will be asked to approve the merger April 23.
Ellison is pushing to wrap the deal up this summer.
“We are deeply concerned by indications of support for this merger that prioritize the interests of a small group of powerful stakeholders over the broader public good,” the letter said. “The integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry would be grievously compromised. Competition is essential for a healthy economy and a healthy democracy. So is thoughtful regulation and enforcement.”
The group urged California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his fellow state attorneys general to sue to block the transaction.
Bonta has told The Times that his office is reviewing the transaction to see if it violates antitrust rules. Two historic movie studios, several streaming services and dozens of cable channels would be brought under one roof.
“Media consolidation has already weakened one of America’s most vital global industries,” the group said, “one that has long shaped culture and connected people around the world.”
Bonta’s office is leading the charge against another merger, TV station giant Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2-billion takeover of Virginia-based Tegna. Eight state attorneys general, including Bonta, have sued to block that deal. A judge is expected to rule on whether to issue a preliminary injunction later this week.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, said on Wednesday that his artificial intelligence company had planned for growing about 10 times as big this year, only to reach a growth rate that could make it 80 times as big this year instead.
Mr. Amodei, 43, made his remarks at Anthropic’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, where he and other executives gave a glimpse into the company’s plans. Anthropic is one of the world’s leading A.I. start-ups with its Claude chatbot and its popular A.I. coding tool, Claude Code, which people can pay to subscribe to. Last month, Anthropic said its annual revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
At the conference, Mr. Amodei said Anthropic had been overwhelmed by the rate of growth, which has increased the company’s need for computing power to deliver its A.I. products to customers.
“I hope that 80-times growth doesn’t continue because that’s just crazy and it’s too hard to handle,” Mr. Amodei said. “I’m hoping for some more normal numbers.”
To obtain more computing power, Anthropic has signed a series of deals with industry giants. At the conference, Anthropic said it had sealed an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all of the computing capacity from the rocket company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. The move gives Anthropic access to the computing power of more than 220,000 Nvidia A.I. chips, the company said, and opens the door to working with SpaceX to create A.I. data centers in space.
Anthropic declined to disclose the terms of the deal. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
“As you saw today with the SpaceX compute deal, we’re working as quickly as possible to provide more compute than we have in the past,” Mr. Amodei said, using an industry term for computing power. He added that his company was working every day “to obtain even more compute” for users.
With the SpaceX deal, Anthropic said, it can expand the amount of coding that some Claude Code subscribers can do before they hit a usage limit with the tool. Anthropic offers people different pricing depending on the amount of coding they want to do.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s impending sale has rattled Hollywood — and the company’s balance sheet as the auction’s high costs increasingly come into focus.
The New York-based media company released its first-quarter earnings report Wednesday, which included a $2.9-billion loss. That amount includes $1.3 billion in restructuring expenses, including updated valuations for Warner’s declining linear cable television networks.
Contributing to the net loss was the $2.8-billion termination fee paid to Netflix in late February when the streaming giant bowed out of the bidding for Warner. The auction winner, Paramount Skydance, covered the payment to Netflix, but Warner still must carry the obligation on its balance sheet in case the Paramount takeover falls apart. Should that happen, Warner would have to reimburse Paramount.
Warner also spent an additional $100 million to run the auction and prepare for the upcoming transaction, according to its regulatory filing.
Stockholders late last month overwhelmingly approved Warner’s sale to Paramount.
The $111-billion deal faces opposition among film and television industry workers, many of whom have been sidelined after previous consolidations among the original studios and a pullback in production that has hurt the L.A. economy.
“As we prepare for our next chapter, our focus remains on executing our key strategic priorities: scaling HBO Max globally, returning our Studios to industry leadership, and optimizing our Global Linear Networks,” Warner Bros. Discovery leaders said Wednesday in a letter to shareholders.
In the January-March period, Warner generated $8.9 billion in revenue, a 3% decline from the same quarter one year ago, excluding the effect of foreign exchange rate fluctuations.
The company’s results fell short of Wall Street estimates. It posted a $1.17-per-share loss, much wider than analysts’ expectations for a loss of about 11 cents per share.
Warner’s streaming services, including HBO Max, notched milestones in the quarter and 9% revenue growth to $2.9 billion. The company launched HBO Max in Germany, Italy, Britain and Ireland during the quarter.
Advertising revenue for streaming was up 20% compared with the first quarter of 2025.
The streaming unit posted a 17% increase to $438 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA.
Warner’s studios, primarily its TV business, had a strong quarter, in part because of those international rollouts.
Studio revenue rose 35% to $3.1 billion compared with the prior-year quarter.
Television revenue soared 58% (excluding exchange rate fluctuations) because of increased program licensing fees to support the launch of HBO Max in the international markets. The launches also propelled the movie studio, which saw revenue increase 21%.
Video game revenue declined 30% because of lower library revenues.
Adjusted EBITDA for the studios grew $516 million (156%) to $775 million compared with the same quarter last year.
The company’s vast linear television networks — including CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network, HGTV, Animal Planet and TLC — saw revenue fall 8% to $4.4 billion.
TV distribution revenue tumbled 7% largely because of a 10% decrease in domestic linear pay TV subscribers.
The company also felt the loss of its NBA contract for its TNT channel, which NBC picked up for its network and streaming service. Advertising revenue fell 11%. “The absence of the NBA negatively impacted the year-over-year growth rate,” Warner said.
The collapse of the legacy cable TV business is one of the drivers behind Paramount’s quest to acquire Warner. Both companies have long relied on their cable TV profits to shore up more volatile business segments, including their film studios. Paramount also wants Warner’s prestigious properties, including its film and TV studios and HBO Max, which now has 140 million subscribers.
But as the Paramount-Warner merger draws closer, the opposition has grown louder.
More than 4,000 artists and entertainment industry workers, including Bryan Cranston, Noah Wyle, Kristen Stewart and Jane Fonda, have signed an open letter warning about the dangers of the merger with Paramount.
“This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries — and the audiences we serve — can least afford it,” according to the letter.
“The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”
The merger still needs the approval of regulators in the U.S. and abroad.
Adjusted EBITDA for the television networks fell 10% to $1.6 billion.
Warner ended the quarter with $3.3 billion in cash on hand and $33.4 billion of gross debt.
Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s commerce secretary, faced questions on Wednesday in a closed-door session of the House Oversight Committee over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.
Mr. Lutnick is one of the highest-profile cabinet members to come under scrutiny in connection with Mr. Epstein. The commerce secretary’s name appeared in more than 250 documents in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department, a review by The New York Times found.
Asked whether Mr. Lutnick’s credibility had been undermined, Representative James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky who chairs the House Oversight Committee said Wednesday, “we’re going to ask him all these questions, and we’ll let the American people judge whether the credibility was damaged or not at the end of the day.”
Mr. Comer said that Mr. Lutnick “wasn’t 100 percent truthful with whether he or not he had been on the island.”
He added that it was the first time in the last decade that a chairman of the oversight committee had brought in a cabinet secretary of his own party.
During the hearing Mr. Lutnick downplayed his ties to Mr. Epstein, claiming their relationship was inconsequential, according to two people familiar with his testimony.
Mr. Lutnick lived next door to Mr. Epstein on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for over a decade. Until recently, he had claimed to have not been in the same room with Mr. Epstein after an encounter in 2005. But millions of documents that were released by the Justice Department earlier this year showed that Mr. Lutnick had traveled to Mr. Epstein’s private island in 2012.
The documents suggest Mr. Lutnick had another encounter with Mr. Epstein at his house in 2011, years after Mr. Lutnick claimed to have cut ties with him. The records also indicated that the men invested in the same privately held company together and dealt with each other on neighborhood and philanthropic issues.
Mr. Epstein, who was convicted in Florida in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor, died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while being held on federal sex-trafficking charges.
Mr. Lutnick has received questions from lawmakers about his connections with Mr. Epstein in congressional hearings on other topics, first in February and again last month.
All Democrats and some Republicans on the Oversight Committee signaled that they would try to force a vote on a subpoena for Mr. Lutnick. But the panel’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, said that Mr. Lutnick had volunteered to testify.
The Commerce Department said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Lutnick looked forward to “putting to rest the inaccurate and baseless claims in the media.”
Though the committee’s investigation into Mr. Epstein and the Justice Department’s handling of the case against him has sprawled to include a number of political figures, Mr. Lutnick is the first current Trump administration official to testify before the panel.
The committee also issued a subpoena to Pam Bondi, the former attorney general who Mr. Trump fired last month, before she was dismissed from her position. She has not yet appeared for a deposition.
Questions by lawmakers in the closed-door session on Wednesday could touch on Mr. Lutnick’s former nanny. The files showed that Mr. Epstein expressed an interest in meeting the nanny in 2013 and had her résumé sent to him. It is not clear if they ever met.
Mr. Lutnick said in February that he did not know if the nanny had met Mr. Epstein, or if she was one of the nannies Mr. Lutnick had brought to the island. Mr. Lutnick has four children.
In October, Mr. Lutnick said in a podcast interview that he had decided after a 2005 incident not to associate with Mr. Epstein, after Mr. Epstein alluded to his sexual encounters with women while giving Mr. Lutnick and his wife a tour of his house.
“My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” Mr. Lutnick said on the podcast, “Pod Force One.” “So I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy.”
But in a congressional hearing in February, Mr. Lutnick told lawmakers that he not only met with Mr. Epstein after that encounter, but that he and his family also traveled to his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, in 2012 for lunch. Mr. Lutnick was traveling aboard his yacht, accompanied by his wife, children, nannies and another family.
The visit took place four years after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor as part of a plea bargain with federal prosecutors.
-
New York14 minutes agoMamdani Wants Free Buses for All. The City Council Has Different Ideas.
-
Detroit, MI44 minutes ago
Breaking down the Detroit Lions roster: Defense
-
San Francisco, CA56 minutes agoMissing man, 85, last seen in South San Francisco
-
Dallas, TX1 hour agoCowboys’ Stephen Jones says what NFL won’t admit about the Micah Parsons trade
-
Miami, FL1 hour agoWhat we learned about the pecking order after Miami
-
Boston, MA1 hour agoI was ready to hate the new Copley Square Park. Then I visited it. – The Boston Globe
-
Denver, CO1 hour agoJonah Coleman says being a Bronco is ‘the best thing in the world’ as rookie camp begins
-
Seattle, WA1 hour agoMeet the ‘fuel mitigation specialists’ protecting Pierce County from wildfires