The Writers Guild of America came out swinging on Thursday against a merger between Warner Bros. and any other studio, saying such consolidation would be a “disaster” for writers.
The statement comes two days after Warner Bros. said it is considering “multiple offers.” Paramount, freshly acquired by David Ellison’s Skydance, is the most eager suitor. Any deal involving another content producer would shrink the number of buyers in the marketplace.
“Merger after merger in the media industry has harmed workers, diminished competition and free speech, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars better invested in organic growth,” the WGA East and West said in a statement Thursday. “Combining Warner Bros. with Paramount or another major studio or streamer would be a disaster for writers, for consumers, and for competition. The WGAW and WGAE will work with regulators to block the merger.”
The WGA has a long track record of opposition to industry mergers. It opposed the failed Dish-DirecTV merger in 2002.
In 2011, the union sought to block the merger of Comcast and NBCUniversal, warning that the media landscape was already too consolidated. The union also warned that Comcast might use its control of cable distribution to favor its own content.
The WGA also raised “net neutrality” concerns in expressing its opposition to the AT&T merger with Time Warner, which was announced in 2016.
“At a time when the country demands, and needs, the broadest possible set of views and stories and voices, we have handed over the keys to the media kingdom to giants whose sole motivation is to maximize their short-term investment return, not to inform or enlighten or entertain,” the WGA East said when the merger was approved in 2018.
The union also opposed the Disney-Fox merger in 2017 and the Amazon-MGM merger in 2021. It blasted the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery in 2022, which undid the AT&T merger from a few years earlier, calling it a “clear disaster for the content creators who have lost jobs and a potential employer, as well as for the consumers who are faced with a poorer, less-diverse content landscape.”
The union has also called for more robust antitrust enforcement. In 2023, the union warned that Disney, Netflix and Amazon were poised to become the “new gatekeepers” of the industry.
