A federal judge has approved Paramount’s settlement with a dozen states that had sued to block its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, clearing the final obstacle the company had identified before it can close an $81 billion merger.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued the order Wednesday, ruling that the proposed consent decree represented a “fair, reasonable, and good faith approach to address the competitive harms” the states had alleged. The ruling came down Wednesday afternoon.
Almost immediately after the decision landed, Paramount announced that Ynon Kreiz, the current chief executive of toy company Mattel, will join the company on Oct. 5. He will serve as co-CEO alongside David Ellison of the combined business — a striking leadership pairing for a studio group that will now house two of Hollywood’s last five legacy studios under one roof.
What’s actually coming together
The consolidated company would fold a sprawling set of properties into a single entity: HBO Max and its deep library — including the Harry Potter titles — and cable news network CNN would sit alongside CBS, the Top Gun franchise, and the Paramount+ streaming service.
Paramount had previously described the state antitrust challenge as the last hurdle standing between it and the Warner acquisition, and had signaled an intention to close as soon as early October.
How the states’ lawsuit ended
Top prosecutors from 12 states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, filed suit in July with an initial goal of stopping the merger outright. They argued a Paramount-Warner combination would “extinguish competition” and leave consumers — particularly moviegoers and cable subscribers — with fewer choices.
Last week, the states agreed to resolve those claims through a set of new commitments from Paramount. Among them: pledges to increase film production in the U.S. over the next five years, to commit millions of dollars to a fund supporting workers displaced by the merger, and to establish new editorial monitoring of CNN and CBS.
When the agreement was announced on Sept. 21, Bonta framed it as a matter of “protecting people’s careers, the lives they’ve built here in California, the livelihoods their families rely on.” He also made clear the settlement was not an endorsement of the merger itself.
The judge didn’t just wave it through
Critics of the tie-up moved quickly to call the deal a capitulation to corporate pressure, arguing the terms were too weak to matter. And Martínez-Olguín did not approve the settlement the moment it landed. At a hearing the previous week, she said the court is not merely a “rubber stamp” for arrangements of this kind, and that she still had questions.
She went further than many observers expected: granting outside opponents of the settlement — among them members of the Block The Merger coalition and the League of United Latin American Citizens — a short window to file amicus briefs laying out their objections. The judge also directed Paramount and the settling states to respond to a letter from Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, who had pushed for a more thorough review.
In the end, though, Martínez-Olguín concluded that the desire for tougher terms “do not rise to the level of legal violations upon which the Court can reject the parties’ negotiated resolution.”
The pushback isn’t over
Block the Merger responded to Wednesday’s order by calling the settlement “toothless” and warning about the consequences it expects to follow.
“Allowing the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger to move forward with no meaningful structural remedies will cost jobs, mute creativity, weaken independent journalism, and damage our First Amendment rights,” the coalition said in a statement.
But the group also struck a note of defiance rather than defeat, suggesting the fight had at least raised public awareness. If there is one discernible benefit to the approval of the takeover, the coalition said, “it’s that people are now wide awake and paying attention — and their anger is not going to fade away.”
The Writers Guild of America, which filed its own lawsuit shortly after the states did in July, also reached a settlement with Paramount last week. The guild concluded it could not carry on the legal fight on its own.
With the consent decree approved, the path is now open for the deal to close, and for Kreiz to step into a shared leadership role at one of the largest entertainment conglomerates assembled in recent years.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/09/30/paramount-warner-bros-merger-to-close-next-week-after-judge-approves-settlement-with-democrat-ags/