By Dominic Patten
There will be no settlement talks meeting Monday between Paramount and a coalition of state Attorneys General after all.
California AG Rob Bonta cancelled the scheduled sit-down late Sunday after reports of an August 21 meeting with the David Ellison-led company oozed out. More galling to Bonta is that what was discussed at that meeting about a meeting slipped out into the public sphere.
“Not only did Paramount leak the alleged substance of settlement discussions, but they misrepresented these discussions, demonstrating a lack of good faith,” the AG said in a statement provided to Deadline in the midnight hour. “As soon as Paramount stops playing games and engages sincerely, my office is happy to meet again.”
News of behind the scenes talks in the bitter battle over Paramount’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros Discovery were actually first confirmed publicly by none other than Gov. Gavin Newsom. “I know there are many meetings that are going on, and there’s a lot of conversation,” the presumed 2028 presidential candidate said on August 21.
It should be noted that Deadline actually heard details of the August 21 preliminary gathering to set the agenda for the August 24 meeting from a variety of sources, if you know what I mean?
Though expectations for the August 24 meeting were “intentionally low,” sources told Deadline Sunday, there seemed to be several hot ticket items on the table for the parties.
Specifically, representatives of the 12 state AGs who sued Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery in an antitrust action on July 13 wanted CEO Ellison to sell a swath of WBD’s still lucrative cable channel stable. As well, the elected officials sought to have Paramount and WB remain two separate studios, with Donald Trump pal Ellison ( and to some extent his father and backer Larry Ellison) practically cordoned off from running the place he just bought.
“David’s not going to go along with any of that, and Bonta knows it,” a studio exec told Deadline Sunday of the discussion points put on the table. Clear non-starters with Ellison and Para execs, the agenda points also reflect the wide figurative and literal distance between the AGs, their lawsuit partners the WGA and the Melrose lot.
Paramount did not respond early Monday to request for comment on Bonta’s pulling of the meeting plug. The New York Times first reported the meeting cancellation.
Urged by the likes of Gov. Newsom, flip-flopping L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, the DGA, IATSE, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, and others to sit down and hammer out a settlement, the AGs and Paramount/WBD have been set by a federal judge to go to trial on March 2, 2027.
With Bonta decrying leaks of Ellison moving Paramount Skydance to Georgia, Texas or Tennessee if the ParaBros merger doesn’t see significant talks or resolution by October 1 as “blackmail,” the bitterness between the two has become as much a corporate and political showdown as a legal one. The CEO penning NYT op-eds insisting it is all about CNN, didn’t help the healing process.
The already reinforced battlefronts became all the more stark over the past week with Paramount ignoring federal Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin’s earlier implied rejection of any bond from the states and asking for a $1.88 billion bond to offset the “extraordinary losses” the suit could cost the company. Add to that another report submitted to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on August 19 spotlighting “about 4,500 TV and film jobs ..could be lost.”
The L.A. County Department of Economic Opportunity also estimates thousands of more indirect and industry adjacent jobs will be wiped out by the more than $80 billion debt carry ParaBros. The bigger picture puts another consequence of the merger being the loss of wages in the billions and the region losing $547 million in tax revenue.
No further settlement meetings had been put on the calender beyond today.
One source said to Deadline the fight between Paramount and Bonta is all a “game of PR chicken.” If so, then someone just blinked.
