Dozens of entertainment workers, small business owners and advocates convened in Los Angeles on Saturday to register opposition to Paramount Skydance’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, an acquisition valued at $110 billion. The meeting, organized as the opening stop of a three-city "Main Street vs. The Merger" tour, drew roughly 100 attendees to Lumiere Music Hall to hear from industry figures and union representatives who say the deal threatens jobs and creative diversity.
Stand-up comedian Adam Conover, a featured speaker at the event, described the wave of consolidation sweeping the media business as an existential risk to an industry he said helped make the United States a global cultural force. "It’s about to die, and that’s why I feel so passionately about this issue," he told the crowd.
Organizers included advocacy groups, the Writers Guild of America and entertainment workers seeking to highlight the local impact of a large-scale corporate combination. Speakers pointed to prior merger-driven cost cutting and program cancellations as direct examples of harms that can follow consolidation.
Conover cited the cancellation of his TruTV series "Adam Ruins Everything" following AT&T’s 2018 acquisition of Time Warner. He said that cancellation contributed to layoffs affecting staff, contractors and more than 100 other people connected to the production.
Paramount Skydance executives have publicly sought to allay such concerns, offering assurances that the transaction would not damage other studios or creative talent. Chief Executive David Ellison has pledged the combined Paramount and Warner organizations would remain active, committing to release at least 30 films a year.
Despite those corporate assurances, a group of U.S. states, including California and New York, are preparing a lawsuit to block the merger, sources familiar with the matter said on Friday. That anticipated legal challenge suggests regulators and state officials may pursue antitrust arguments even as other federal authorities appear inclined toward approval.
Speakers at the Los Angeles event presented data and personal testimony intended to illustrate how the industry has changed in recent years. Employment in the entertainment sector, the crowd was told, has declined since its late-2022 peak. The Milken Institute calculates that California lost 17,234 entertainment jobs between 2019 and 2023, a figure attendees used to underline the local economic stakes.
Panelists blamed a range of pressures for shifting studio decision-making, including falling television advertising revenue and stalling growth in streaming services, which together have pushed studios to seek lower-cost production locations. Film LA, the nonprofit that coordinates filming in greater Los Angeles, reported that sound stage occupancy in Hollywood had fallen to 62 percent in the first half of 2025, a sharp drop from near-full utilization in 2016.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents roughly 170,000 behind-the-scenes professionals, has stated that members worked about 36 percent fewer hours than they did in 2022, another metric cited by speakers to show diminished demand for local labor.
Matt Radecki, co-founder of the Different by Design post-production facility in Los Angeles, warned that consolidation would reduce the number of buyers willing to acquire documentary films. He referenced the Oscar-winning documentary "Navalny," which was produced by two Warner units, HBO Max and CNN Films, as an example of work that might face a smaller market if studios consolidate. "This is the biggest thing that we’ve faced," he told attendees. "The places we work with are closed ... They’re gone, and they’re never coming back, and we don’t want to see that happen to HBO or CNN or CNN Films."
Former Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya spoke at the event and expressed optimism that California Attorney General Rob Bonta could mount a successful legal challenge to block the merger. Bedoya suggested Bonta could argue the deal lessens competition among film studios in ways that would indirectly harm workers.
Speakers and analysts also noted that antitrust law in the United States allows challenges that focus on labor market competition. They pointed to the Justice Department’s prior use of that theory in the context of Penguin Random House’s 2022 effort to acquire Simon & Schuster as a precedent for a labor-focused legal approach.
Ioana Marinescu, a University of Pennsylvania economist who helped write the Biden-era Justice Department’s guidelines on labor market issues, said some jobs at the two companies could be highly specialized and lack close substitutes. "For some workers it could be that jobs at these two companies are really special, and this is really what they want," she said. "And there isn’t necessarily a very close substitute. And those are the people for whom it’s going to make an adverse impact."
The Los Angeles gathering is likely to be followed by additional stops on the planned three-city tour as entertainment workers and allied groups seek to build public and legal opposition to the proposed transaction. Whether that opposition will succeed in court or alter federal regulators’ stance remains uncertain, though state-led litigation is now being prepared, organizers and participants said.