"The temporary order is only in effect for 14 days, but it can be converted into a preliminary injunction that would prevent the merger from being completed until the case is resolved. The temporary restraining order can be extended past the 14-day period if more time is needed to rule on a preliminary injunction."
The word "halt" made it sound more permanent than this really is.
I support the idea of states' rights. However, I'm also salty as fuck that the slavedrivers of the Civil War ruined the entire concept. That enabled the federal government to stomp on the concept, in some cases fully warranted (like civil rights), in other cases not so much (like Wickard v. Filburn and the entire perversion of the Commerce Clause to turn it into full federal preemption).
>Kind of wild that states can just sue and have success in blocking a merger. Any of 50 states can potentially have a veto on something like this? On what grounds?
This isn't a permanent injunction, the judge simply paused the merger for two weeks while they can hold a hearing on a longer injunction ahead of a trial
And even that injunction wouldn't be permanent, it would just keep the transaction from completing until the trial is complete, since obviously if they merge it is hard to unwind should Paramount lose
And yes, states can "just sue" to enforce the law, just like the DOJ could have sued to enforce the law. Antitrust is not a criminal matter, but this is essentially the same thing as filing charges
What's your mental model for bigger company = worse movies?
Here are a few positives:
Larger movie catalog all under one place, better value bundle due to fewer transaction costs in negotiation. Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.
More risky movies. If a company has more diversified income stream, it can take more risks on new and interesting movies.
More movies. Shared expenses and synergies can produce lower costs and increase supply.
More investment in technology. It makes sense for a larger company to invest more in technology since the business impact and throughput is larger (technology scales).
Less likely to go out of business. Larger and more diversified revenue stream means more long terms security.
Instead of a flippant one sentence snarky response, make the argument or don't comment at all.
Observationally, larger companies already in the lead seem prefer a safe X% return for their shareholders and don't need to take large risks. Smaller companies trying to make it don't have the liberty to rest on their laurels, and often will be risking it all on some idea being a massive hit.
Following that logic, Microsoft and oracle should be putting out a lot of innovative quirky software!
I can’t think of a single example where a super large company gets more willing to take risks when it gets larger. Theres probably a few exceptions but I can’t think of any.
the most obvious display of risk aversion is the greenlighting and production of "Spiderman 35 Electric Boogaloo" and "Batman # 740 The Dark Knight Re-Rises Again" -- meanwhile indies are still struggling to find first investors or writing money.
as I said in another comment : These large firms do not take risk.
You don't need a citation for everything. It's common sense.
But sure, look at big tech with a money printing machine, insane margins and revenue. Amazon spends 90b a year on r&d (~14% of revenue). Meta is about 26% of revenue and so on.
That's risk as it's not tied to their core business and most if not all is punted away.
Can you give me a citation of a small company willing to punt 14-24% of their revenue on long term projects that may not bare any results?
How much of Meta's r&d is spent on keeping people addicted to their apps? I'd argue Amazon and Meta were both more innovative when there was no or very little revenue.
Meta essentially replaced myspace, which basically went down hill after being bought out by a much larger company.
Why do you ask questions you can easily ask to an LLM? You probably don't care, your world view is "Meta bad".
Meta created and support React which runs much of the internet. Pytorch, which runs most AI models. GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more that I can't remember.
History well supports that large companies do not innovate well, with nearly all collapsing due to stagnation and bureaucracy. A predicted bad outcome does not mean they can avoid it
It's interesting that you bring up Netflix. While their initial offering of having a good selection of movies in one subscription was very attractive, their expansion and eventual entry to public stock market caused it to be pretty much synonymous with "slop" in TV and movie circles, which I think makes a very good case that "big production studio" != "good quality productions".
Warner Bros specifically, while still a very large studio, has been relatively generous with funding more risky movies, and there is a lot of warranted caution that this consolidation is going to result in streamlining everything into taking as few risks as possible and aiming for broadest appeal and highest possible gross margins, which is a terrible thing for anything that could be considered art.
Netflix completely changed the game. They paid huge amounts to produce original content. Direct to TV used to be an insult now you have triple A content direct to steaming. You forget what the market looked like pre Netflix. Sure you don't like their content now, but that's not the point
Comedians for instance get 10 - 25m per special, they were getting a fraction of that before Netflix. They had to sign on shitty sitcoms to make any money
all one has to do is look at movies from indie groups versus conglomerates in order to pick apart every point you made aside from technology investment and movie volume.
your most laughable point is the one about risk : no one takes less risk than a huge conglomerate beholden to a board and shareholders.
real risk in cinema comes the cast and crew that decide to forego dinner in order to get their vision to the screen, and the arts are filled with such passionate examples.
Not everyone wants the 1500th star wars or marvel movie, even the fan bases for those releases are tired.
> What's your mental model for bigger company = worse movies?
Monopoly => lack of competition => enshittification and abuse.
> Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.
As much as I like Netflix, permanent ownership of movies and series on my side, after one time payment would be hugely desirable. Overall, I dont like this "you just rent catalogues you have no control over" development is all that great.
Again, incapable of a middle school level intelligent response. The irony.
Seems like this conversation would be more productive if you put any thought into your counter-arguements rather than just insulting every response for the gall of answering you.
> Are you really comparing youtube with theatre movies?
Yes I'm comparing youtube to movies. They're direct competitors. My decision on Friday night is often do I go to the movies or do I watch something on YouTube.
> Do you really think a monopoly is going to improve anything for anybody?
They don't have a monopoly on any meaningful product category.
Sometimes companies go out of business because the economics are so bad (e.g. Spirit). I'm not sure if economics are that bad in film industry, but there are benefits of being a certain size or having a larger catalog. Don't people always complain about having to go to many different streaming services to find a movie?
Birdsong and Golden Peanut together have controlled roughly 80% of U.S. peanut shelling, with Olam holding another 10% or more.
Warner Bros. releases roughly 20-30 wide theatrical films per year, or about 8-12% of all U.S. theatrical releases (counting independent films as well).
Paramount Pictures releases roughly 10-20 wide theatrical films per year, or about 3-7% of all U.S. theatrical releases.
Not the original commentator, but I think they're suggesting that you're free to compete in these markets, but the margins are too tight until you're working at the scale of these big guys, so nobody does.
you'd have to actually care about politics, the far right, how ruper murdoch and nixon's advisors spent 50 years making Fox news an unassailable fortress of misinformation a geriatric rapist used as a platform to take over a democratic leadership.
Those are the same people trying to take another media entity into.
i stay out of politics but to say that only fox is doing misinformation is turning a blind eye to the lies of NYT, CBS, CNN, ABC, BBC (although foreign owned) and MSNBC.
OP did not say "only fox is doing misinformation". Rather they are referencing what was a deliberate goal for Fox from its outset [0]. Other companies and individual journalists followed suit to various degrees, yes.
[0] https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created which is itself kind of a simplistic, preach-to-the-choir piece. But as you said you mostly stay out of politics, I figure it is easier to follow rather than say the full Wikipedia article on Roger Ailes.
"The temporary order is only in effect for 14 days, but it can be converted into a preliminary injunction that would prevent the merger from being completed until the case is resolved. The temporary restraining order can be extended past the 14-day period if more time is needed to rule on a preliminary injunction."
The word "halt" made it sound more permanent than this really is.
TRO: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...
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What is supposed to be the connection here?
>"handing an early win to states that sued to block the deal" I think
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And only if the state goes their way. If they don't, they are totally fine with the feds overruling their state.
I support the idea of states' rights. However, I'm also salty as fuck that the slavedrivers of the Civil War ruined the entire concept. That enabled the federal government to stomp on the concept, in some cases fully warranted (like civil rights), in other cases not so much (like Wickard v. Filburn and the entire perversion of the Commerce Clause to turn it into full federal preemption).
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>Kind of wild that states can just sue and have success in blocking a merger. Any of 50 states can potentially have a veto on something like this? On what grounds?
This isn't a permanent injunction, the judge simply paused the merger for two weeks while they can hold a hearing on a longer injunction ahead of a trial
And even that injunction wouldn't be permanent, it would just keep the transaction from completing until the trial is complete, since obviously if they merge it is hard to unwind should Paramount lose
And yes, states can "just sue" to enforce the law, just like the DOJ could have sued to enforce the law. Antitrust is not a criminal matter, but this is essentially the same thing as filing charges
It's not just movies. These are general media concerns. Which can affect politics a lot, look at fox as an example.
> Who cares?
People who like movies, presumably
What's your mental model for bigger company = worse movies?
Here are a few positives:
Larger movie catalog all under one place, better value bundle due to fewer transaction costs in negotiation. Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.
More risky movies. If a company has more diversified income stream, it can take more risks on new and interesting movies.
More movies. Shared expenses and synergies can produce lower costs and increase supply.
More investment in technology. It makes sense for a larger company to invest more in technology since the business impact and throughput is larger (technology scales).
Less likely to go out of business. Larger and more diversified revenue stream means more long terms security.
Instead of a flippant one sentence snarky response, make the argument or don't comment at all.
> More risky movies. If a company has more diversified income stream, it can take more risks on new and interesting movies.
Citation. This is not my observation.
Do you think a company w less diversified source of income would be willing to take more risk, knowing that room for error is very small?
Observationally, larger companies already in the lead seem prefer a safe X% return for their shareholders and don't need to take large risks. Smaller companies trying to make it don't have the liberty to rest on their laurels, and often will be risking it all on some idea being a massive hit.
Following that logic, Microsoft and oracle should be putting out a lot of innovative quirky software!
I can’t think of a single example where a super large company gets more willing to take risks when it gets larger. Theres probably a few exceptions but I can’t think of any.
the most obvious display of risk aversion is the greenlighting and production of "Spiderman 35 Electric Boogaloo" and "Batman # 740 The Dark Knight Re-Rises Again" -- meanwhile indies are still struggling to find first investors or writing money.
as I said in another comment : These large firms do not take risk.
All I asked for was a citation, as my observations have been that smaller companies are more willing to take risks as they need to survive.
The larger the corporation, the more risk adverse they are.
You don't need a citation for everything. It's common sense.
But sure, look at big tech with a money printing machine, insane margins and revenue. Amazon spends 90b a year on r&d (~14% of revenue). Meta is about 26% of revenue and so on.
That's risk as it's not tied to their core business and most if not all is punted away.
Can you give me a citation of a small company willing to punt 14-24% of their revenue on long term projects that may not bare any results?
How much of Meta's r&d is spent on keeping people addicted to their apps? I'd argue Amazon and Meta were both more innovative when there was no or very little revenue.
Meta essentially replaced myspace, which basically went down hill after being bought out by a much larger company.
Why do you ask questions you can easily ask to an LLM? You probably don't care, your world view is "Meta bad".
Meta created and support React which runs much of the internet. Pytorch, which runs most AI models. GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more that I can't remember.
What are you talking about?
That world model is not in touch with reality.
R&D spend does not correlate with innovation or creativity. It’s surprising what gets counted as R&D in a big company.
Small companies have to have an innovative product in order to compete with the big fish who operate economies of scale.
Very productive comment. Here is my reply:
R&D spend does correlate with innovation and creativity. It’s surprising what it takes to consider something as R&D in a big company.
start-ups spend over 100% of revenue on risky ventures.
Yes, because if they don't take the risk they are guaranteed to collapse. History supports this idea.
History well supports that large companies do not innovate well, with nearly all collapsing due to stagnation and bureaucracy. A predicted bad outcome does not mean they can avoid it
It's interesting that you bring up Netflix. While their initial offering of having a good selection of movies in one subscription was very attractive, their expansion and eventual entry to public stock market caused it to be pretty much synonymous with "slop" in TV and movie circles, which I think makes a very good case that "big production studio" != "good quality productions".
Warner Bros specifically, while still a very large studio, has been relatively generous with funding more risky movies, and there is a lot of warranted caution that this consolidation is going to result in streamlining everything into taking as few risks as possible and aiming for broadest appeal and highest possible gross margins, which is a terrible thing for anything that could be considered art.
Netflix completely changed the game. They paid huge amounts to produce original content. Direct to TV used to be an insult now you have triple A content direct to steaming. You forget what the market looked like pre Netflix. Sure you don't like their content now, but that's not the point
Comedians for instance get 10 - 25m per special, they were getting a fraction of that before Netflix. They had to sign on shitty sitcoms to make any money
What are you talking about?
>Sure you don't like their content now, but that's not the point
That is very much the point. The initial point of bigger company = worse movies.
> bigger company = worse movies?
Less competition.
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“This isn’t Reddit.”
Proceeds to insult every response without actually countering. The irony is palpable.
all one has to do is look at movies from indie groups versus conglomerates in order to pick apart every point you made aside from technology investment and movie volume.
your most laughable point is the one about risk : no one takes less risk than a huge conglomerate beholden to a board and shareholders.
real risk in cinema comes the cast and crew that decide to forego dinner in order to get their vision to the screen, and the arts are filled with such passionate examples.
Not everyone wants the 1500th star wars or marvel movie, even the fan bases for those releases are tired.
> What's your mental model for bigger company = worse movies?
Monopoly => lack of competition => enshittification and abuse.
> Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.
As much as I like Netflix, permanent ownership of movies and series on my side, after one time payment would be hugely desirable. Overall, I dont like this "you just rent catalogues you have no control over" development is all that great.
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Again, incapable of a middle school level intelligent response. The irony.
Seems like this conversation would be more productive if you put any thought into your counter-arguements rather than just insulting every response for the gall of answering you.
Are you really comparing youtube with theatre movies? Do you really think a monopoly is going to improve anything for anybody?
Who cares? Everyone should care about these things. It's 2026 and you still have to explain that monopolies are bad? Jesus
> Are you really comparing youtube with theatre movies?
Yes I'm comparing youtube to movies. They're direct competitors. My decision on Friday night is often do I go to the movies or do I watch something on YouTube.
> Do you really think a monopoly is going to improve anything for anybody?
They don't have a monopoly on any meaningful product category.
Sometimes companies go out of business because the economics are so bad (e.g. Spirit). I'm not sure if economics are that bad in film industry, but there are benefits of being a certain size or having a larger catalog. Don't people always complain about having to go to many different streaming services to find a movie?
They don't have a monopoly on any meaningful product category.
By that reasoning I could have a monopoly on peanuts and it’s alright because consumers can choose from hundreds of other foods.
Birdsong and Golden Peanut together have controlled roughly 80% of U.S. peanut shelling, with Olam holding another 10% or more.
Warner Bros. releases roughly 20-30 wide theatrical films per year, or about 8-12% of all U.S. theatrical releases (counting independent films as well).
Paramount Pictures releases roughly 10-20 wide theatrical films per year, or about 3-7% of all U.S. theatrical releases.
Hope this helps
That’s not good either. It’s the same with poultry, many types of fruit, etc. This just makes the case further.
Not the original commentator, but I think they're suggesting that you're free to compete in these markets, but the margins are too tight until you're working at the scale of these big guys, so nobody does.
> Who cares?
Someone cares enough to offer $111B...
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you'd have to actually care about politics, the far right, how ruper murdoch and nixon's advisors spent 50 years making Fox news an unassailable fortress of misinformation a geriatric rapist used as a platform to take over a democratic leadership.
Those are the same people trying to take another media entity into.
i stay out of politics but to say that only fox is doing misinformation is turning a blind eye to the lies of NYT, CBS, CNN, ABC, BBC (although foreign owned) and MSNBC.
AFAIK, Fox News Channel is the only one to ever stand in court and argue that they're not really news, but "entertainment".
yeah, it's clear you stay out of politics; politics does not stay out of you.
OP did not say "only fox is doing misinformation". Rather they are referencing what was a deliberate goal for Fox from its outset [0]. Other companies and individual journalists followed suit to various degrees, yes.
[0] https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created which is itself kind of a simplistic, preach-to-the-choir piece. But as you said you mostly stay out of politics, I figure it is easier to follow rather than say the full Wikipedia article on Roger Ailes.
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