Even A Media Giant May Be Ready To Leave Democrat-Run State

Paramount Skydance is flirting with the idea of leaving California as the state leads an antitrust lawsuit against the media company. 

Semafor reported on Monday that friends and advisers close to Paramount CEO David Ellison told him to “consider shifting his business out of the state” and to move the company’s $30 billion in planned spending elsewhere.

Ellison’s advisers are reportedly urging the massive move after a lawsuit filed by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other attorneys general seeks to stop the merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. The lawsuit could cause a delay in the merger and could potentially cost Paramount hundreds of millions of dollars.

Paramount currently owns CBS, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, BET, and Paramount Pictures. In acquiring Warner Bros., the company would gain the rights to brands such as DC Studios, Warner Bros. Animation, HBO, the Discovery Channel, Cartoon Network, CNN, the Food Network, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. Ellison hopes the move can make Paramount a suitable competitor to Netflix and Disney.

“The proposed merger, the largest in Hollywood history, would combine two of Hollywood’s five major film distributors and two of the five major basic cable channel owners … inflicting substantial harm on movie theaters, basic cable distributors and, ultimately, audiences nationwide,” Bonta argued. “In the U.S. alone, if allowed to merge, the combined titan would control nearly one-third of theatrical motion pictures, and nearly one-third of basic cable programming.”

The Trump administration has approved the merger following Paramount’s agreement to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump for $16 million that accused CBS of deceptively editing then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s “60 Minutes” interview.

Other major companies such as Oracle, Tesla, and Chevron have moved out of California to more “business-friendly” states such as Texas.

Paramount has a 10-year lease for 285,000 square feet at a studio in New Jersey, and it is likely that the company will move to the state if they decide to leave California.