Edited by Panagiotis Lampropoulos, PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow and CREATe.
CREATe researchers explore the Paramount-Warner merger and highlight how it involves wider issues of consolidation within the film and streaming industries, including its implications for regulation, competition, creators and the sustainability of independent cinema.
Paramount Skydance (a major film distributor) had a hostile bid accepted for the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery on 27 February 2026. This is a surprising change of trajectory from original acquisition plans, which had apparently been won by Netflix as recently as December 2025. The chair of the US Federal Communications Commission expressed that while the original Netflix deal raised concerns over “concentration of power”, the level of market share held in the film distribution market renders the current acquisition drastically different. The same ethos was shared by the US Department of Justice, which granted Paramount’s bid regulatory approval one week prior to its acceptance, despite putting Netflix under significant scrutiny.
It is also significant to note that Paramount Discovery’s chief executive, Larry Ellison, is also CTO and executive chairman of Oracle, which is part of an investment group which finalized a deal to acquire 80.1% of TikTok, following US Congress’ vote to pass a law banning the social media app in 2024 unless it found a US buyer. In tandem with the DOJ’s inconsistent scrutiny of each Warner Brothers acquisition, it is noteworthy that both deals have involved varying political intervention.
Source: TopSphere Media on Unsplash
Whilst the Paramount deal concerns a lower level of market share held in the film distribution market, meaning that there is less antitrust concern, it is arguable that there has been disanalogous treatment of both parties. Indeed, the Director’s Guild of America expressed concerns over the impact of the Netflix deal, noting concerns over the creative rights of directors and their teams, safeguarding creative careers and the promotion of a vibrant and competitive industry. Now, close to 2000 filmmakers, documentarians and professionals in the film industry released an open letter in April 2026, unequivocally calling for authorities to block on the Paramount merger. In it, they similarly claim the transaction ‘would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape’, warning there will be ‘fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production system, higher costs, and less choices for audiences’. Likewise, Cinema United, which represents 30,000 movie screens in the US claimed that the deal will result in cinemas closing.
Meanwhile, the deal is still under regulatory scrutiny in California and Canada. Although it has not yet opened a formal investigation, the UK’ competition authority (the Competition and Markets Authority, ‘CMA’) has invited comments from interested parties, asking them to submit any initial views on the impact the transaction could have on competition in the UK.
This issue opens an interesting discussion regarding the political economy of creative production. Whilst the Netflix deal regarded a greater market share, the Paramount hostile bid can be seen as a balance against the former’s hegemony over the film industry. Yet, industry stakeholders have largely expressed the same concerns, demonstrating that the problem does not merely lie with one particular deal, but with the concentration of control over the film industry among a small number of streaming platforms. It therefore introduces problems such as catalogue concentration, diversity of content, and creative autonomy. Moreover, it poses challenges for the manner of distribution and exhibition of films, posing a challenge to the viability of a vibrant cinema sector. This plethora of challenges requires a composite approach considerate of the values which result in a competitive and vibrant film sector. The CREATe team offer their perspectives:
Bartolomeo Meletti – Senior Lecturer and Head of Knowledge Exchange
“I am not surprised that documentarians and other filmmakers oppose the Paramount–Warner merger. Among other things, further concentration of IP catalogues is likely to increase rights clearance costs which, as empirical research shows, are already prohibitive for independent creators. Documentary filmmakers need to be able to document reality, including by engaging critically with the contemporary media landscape. As IP portfolios continue to concentrate, the role of copyright exceptions becomes ever more crucial.”
Panagiotis Lampropoulos – PhD Researcher
The concentration of market power in the hands of a small group of streaming platforms, who among other services, act as distributors and exhibitionists of films, will pose an existential threat to the viability of UK cinemas remaining open. Empirical data collected by the Independent Cinema Office (ICO) shows growing concerns, with almost a third of surveyed independent cinemas expressing doubts as to their survival in the next to 3-5 years, whilst only 41% of cinemas deem they will remain operational without any capital support. In Scotland, the Glasgow Film Theatre is set to lose its council funding, a loss which it claims will inevitably risk the future of family, schools and community activities. Similarly, budgets for UK independent films have stagnated, posing a threat to diversity of creative output, according to the BFI.
The practices of major streaming platforms, such as their demands to become the single worldwide distributors of films and their limitation of theatrical windows is likely to further corner British independent cinemas and film production, which are pivotal to everyday life and cultural education. UK copyright law has the ability to create a culture amicable to its independent film and cinema sectors by placing autonomy over distribution and exhibition at the hands of its creators and strengthening its moral rights legislation. For instance, French Copyright law requires the director’s consent for transfers of audiovisual works to a different medium than that which was originally agreed to.”
Aline Iramina – Lecturer in Law
“The Paramount-Warner Bros merger promises to create a stronger direct-to-consumer streaming competitor to rival dominant services like Netflix and Disney+ by combining two platforms with huge TV and film catalogues. This move highlights the significant consolidation taking place in the streaming sector, which is replacing TV as the primary medium for audiovisual consumption, especially among young people. It also raises regulatory questions that go beyond market concentration and other competition-related issues.
Compared to online intermediaries and broadcasters, subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services such as Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and Paramount+ face much less regulatory scrutiny. Despite using extensive user data and powerful interface design elements (particularly recommendation systems) to manage the visibility and discoverability of audiovisual content, and to guide users in their content choices, these services, in general, are not subject to the same transparency and accountability obligations as other types of service. Countries and regions such as Canada, the EU and, more recently, the UK have gradually extended the obligations placed on broadcasters to SVoD services, including prominence rules to enhance the discoverability of public-interest content (e.g., national content) through audiovisual or media law (e.g. the EU AVMS Directive and the UK Media Law). However, the effectiveness of traditional media regulatory tools, such as catalogue quotas, appears to be increasingly limited. Larger streaming services with extensive catalogues, such as Netflix and the service that should emerge from the Paramount-Warner merger, amplify the importance of algorithmic curation, with recommendation systems and interface design becoming the key mechanisms through which creative content and cultural visibility are mediated within these platforms. Yet generally, this is without the same transparency obligations as other media and entertainment services.”
Liana Japaridze – Lecturer in Competition Law
“One of the key arguments put forward by Paramount regarding its merger with WBD relates to the contestability of online streaming markets – via creating a strong competitor for Netflix. The exact merit of this claim can be measured only by comprehensive market/counterfactual analysis, but the experience of the past four years raises suspicions.
More specifically, Discovery Inc./WarnerMedia merger in 2022 (resulting into WBD as we know it today) held a similar promise. With two internationally successful streaming services – Discovery+ and HBO Max – coming under one umbrella, WBD was perfectly positioned to synergise the ‘library’ of its rich and diversified outputs and emerge as an owner of a strong, highly competitive international streaming platform. However, four years later, it seems that Netflix has won a numbers game with a wider international coverage and more than 325 million paid memberships. In the market where scale and scope significantly matter, it is questionable whether even the end-of-2026 forecast for HBO Max to reach 150 million subscribers will be enough to level up the competition in online streaming. Besides, this increased viewership could be attributed more to the recent efforts by WBD than to the Paramount/WBD synergies. Overall, while introducing more competition in the online streaming market seems like a good promise, it is doubtful whether the new deal can deliver it.”
David Reader – Senior Lecturer in Competition Law
“As other colleagues have suggested elsewhere in this post, this is a merger that could very well benefit from a ‘bigger picture’ evaluation; one that looks beyond mere market share parameters and, instead, considers the impact of further consolidation across the creative and media industries. The focus of competition authorities is typically on horizontal overlaps and vertical foreclosure risks, but the modern media landscape is one that has been shaped by a decade-or-more of serial acquisitions and roll‑ups, including many by the parties to this merger.
Conglomerate effects (so often overlooked as grounds for intervention) feel tangibly more relevant to this deal. As Aline alludes to above, the merger stands to create a vast portfolio across streaming platforms, production studios and rights to entertainment/sports broadcasting (to name but a few). Enforcement agencies have increasingly shown an interest in how combined portfolios might be leveraged to the detriment of competition and consumers, even in the absence of market power materialising from a merger.
Competition authorities do possess the tools to address consolidation indirectly, but they still require a specific theory of harm (often rooted in market concentration) in order to unlock them. This suppresses the opportunity for a fully holistic review of the structural story unfolding around the merger, where (mostly creeping) consolidation appears to be nudging the industry ever closer to a tipping point. Political goings-on may also have stifled any immediate hope of agencies considering consolidation as a standalone harm, and these same goings-on would appear to suggest that any alternative routes to a holistic review (e.g. via the UK’s powers to intervene on media public interest grounds) are lacking the political appetite to make them feasible.”
Ruiyu Xu – PhD Researcher
“The US approval of the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger reveals a worrying double standard in antitrust regulation. While regulators penalized Netflix over ‘concentration of power,’ they seemingly overlooked the complex corporate ties behind Paramount’s leadership specifically, the connections to Oracle and the highly politicized mandate surrounding TikTok’s forced sale in the US. This highlights a critical risk for the creative economy: the rise of a ‘monopsony’ (buyer monopoly). When cultural infrastructure is consolidated among a few politically connected giants, independent creators lose bargaining power. The UK’s CMA should maintain absolute independence, looking beyond simple market shares to protect a truly diverse creative ecosystem from political interference.”
Magali Eben – Senior Lecturer in Competition Law
“This planned acquisition has attracted expressions from many players in media and audiovisual industries of their concerns. Questions about the bargaining power of creators, creative diversity of the outputs, and media plurality abound in conversations about a Paramount Warner Bros merger… Yet, these concerns do not fall squarely in the ‘accepted’ remit of competition authorities. Even though these concerns can be linked to industry consolidation, market concentration, or increases in market power, competition authorities in modern times (and in Europe at least since the early 2000s) usually keep these concerns outside of their theories of harm or leave their solutions to sectoral regulators.
This is not to say that competition authorities never care about bargaining power of ‘monopsonies’ vis-a-vis creators: when Penguin Random House wanted to acquire Simon & Schuster, the US Department of Justice considered industry concerns that the merged entity would have so much buyer power that it could suppress the payments for creators, in this case advances for books to authors. Industry participants can of course try to make similar arguments in this context – and hope that the authorities are open to hearing their pleas. When they do bring these forward, however, fears will not be enough: it will be crucial to put forward convincing evidence that this acquisition may lead to worse bargaining power and suppression of the remuneration of creators.
On creative diversity, ongoing and planned CREATe work explores not only the concept of creative diversity, but also whether it could be considered by competition authorities. Perhaps competition authorities will take this acquisition as an opportunity to shed some light on whether diversity of outputs ought to matter, in addition to or alongside levels of output. Interesting times ahead!”
Our rapid response series is designed to offer differentiated views on contested issues, building on existing research within the CREATe centre. Comments do not reflect a corporate position. All academics are happy to be quoted individually or contacted directly.
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