Hollywood Week: Ellison Pauses WBD Deal, Google Fined, Anthropic Caught, World Cup Audience

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Category: Entertainment News

Published on Saturday, 25 July 2026 09:13

Written by Janet Walker

The David Ellison led Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) deal has been put on pause after a judge granted a temporary restraining order, preventing the merger from moving ahead until any outstanding antitrust issues have been resolved.

Paramount Pushes Pause

The Paramount-Skydance WBD sale has been paused, after U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, for the State of California, granted an injunction preventing the sale from moving forward.

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"California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, called the ruling a "critical first win in our case to ensure this megamerger never sees the light of day." He said, "We have a full tank of gas, the law on our side, and look forward to continuing to make our case," The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Attorney General of 12 states, including Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington, joined together contending that the megamerger, which combines the assets of Warner Bros. Discovery, with Paramount-Skydance, creates an unfair advantage, and will decrease competition, and eventually squeeze consumers forcing them to pay more for subscription streaming bundles and movie tickets, and extinguish jobs.

Essentially, the lawsuit contends that the merger will create a monopoly, allowing David Ellison and company to remake the Hollywood landscape in whatever manner he wishes. The tech scion, son of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, has unlimited resources to wait out any temporary judicial interventions, and has agreed to push pause on the merger until all antitrust issues are addressed.

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The Cost of Waiting

While the unusually compliant Ellison has agreed to wait, possibly until June 1, 2027, to proceed with the deal is not without penalty. The "ticking fee," which is a set amount agreed to by both parties at the time the deal was made, on the off chance the timeline for the merger was not met according to the buyers projections.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav built in several potential payouts should the deal with Ellison fall through. The first, a $7 billion regulatory breakup fee payable to WBD if the acquisition deal fails to close due to regulatory issues, and also a ticking fee of $7 million per day, for each day the sale does not close.

"The potential delay in closing could prove expensive for Paramount. Its agreement with Warner includes a "ticking fee" with payments to Warner shareholders of roughly $650 million a quarter, beginning in October, until the transaction closes," The Wall Street Journal reported.

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Why The Brouhaha

The effort to stop the mega-merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery has developed into a major campaign as key points, including job losses, less competition, loss of editorial freedom, and increased costs to the consumer for entertainment offerings rising to the top in the arguments.

The Writer's Guild of America, (WGA), also joined the litigation filed by the states elucidating that the merger would have grave consequences for its members including reduced competition, suppressed wages and fewer jobs.  

Combining the assets of both Paramount-Skydance and WBD amounts to one superpower, as the television, streaming and film studios of each are now under one banner, controlled by one studio. The deal would be akin to redistricting a city, splitting into two parts, the merger reduces the major players and distributors.

The effort to stop the merger is not only due to the Ellison's alliance with President Trump, but more importantly the merger of news organizations, CBS and CNN, which creates a state sponsored media propaganda machine, pumping into the American people a one-sided, MAGA message built to continue a political trend of extreme right wing republicans.

Although, simultaneously, David Ellison has backtracked on allowing "60 Minutes," the weekly news magazine show, under the Paramount banner, agreeing to allow the show to retain editorial control.

"60 Minutes," has experienced a severe purging after the takeover and installment of Bari Weiss as Editor-in-Chief, and others she has hired, in an effort to remake the show into a documentary style program.

"David Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount, promised to respect the editorial independence of "60 Minutes" in a call with Lesley Stahl, one of the show's correspondents, she told The New York Times," The New York Times reported.

Last Thoughts

With the deal paused for potentially 11 months, and the states determined that the deal will never move forward, Ellison to keep the deal in play will need to make serious concessions or, again, as his access to unlimited resources provides him the luxury of waiting, hire attorneys and force

One thing is certain this deal is only good for the undertakers, the attorneys involved, who stand to make billions on whichever way the pendulum swings.

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Google Fined

Search giant Google has been fined $1billion by the European Union for undercutting the competition through promoting its own services above others, placing the advertisements in the most noticeable position on the webpages.

"The European Commission, which conducted the investigation, also concluded that the tech giant used unfair restrictions on its Google Play app store that prevent app developers from communicating with users, or conducting transactions that could reduce the fees Google can collect," The New York Times reported.

For Google, who has faced similar allegations in the U.S., the search giant will be forced to make concessions by allowing other competitors in any of its services or offerings to be positioned more favorable on search engine results. Essentially, the first ten results cannot simply be Google services, they must include competitors.

The fine represents a pittance of the company's $3.87 trillion value.

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Anthropic Caught, Fined

In an effort to expedite its bid to overtake all rivals in the end-to-end drafting space, Anthropic's model Claude has been singled out, and the company ordered to pay a $1billion fine for pirating author's novels for use in training the AI model.

"A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides "meaningful relief" to affected authors and publishers," APNews.com reported.

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World Cup Audience

World Cup fever may be over, but statistically, soccer has seen a resurgence in the United States, the home host for the 2026 World Cup.

"Nearly 63 million Americans tuned in to watch Spain beat Argentina in the FIFA World Cup final on Sunday, shattering viewership records and underscoring soccer's growing appeal in the U.S. after decades of efforts to broaden its audience," NBCnews.com reported.

The numbers for Sunday's final match do not include the total number of viewers, or streaming numbers from other services. What the numbers do provide are an insight into the growing popularity of what was once only considered as a foreign sport. Soccer nee football has reached the American mainstream.

However, as most celebrities will explain fame is fleeting and the 2030 FIFA World Cup will be co-hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. As the United States will not be the home host country, its doubtful the fan appreciation will be as reverent as recently witnessed.

With great moments, who can forget the stadium sections of Norwegian fans and their "Viking row," which caught on and became a meme, or the climatic score in the 106th minute of the finals, the FIFA 2026 World Cup will live on in reruns and highlights.

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Janet Walker is the publisher, founder, and sole owner of Haute-Lifestyle.com. A graduate of New York University, she has been covering international news through the Beltway Insider, a weekly review of the nation's top stories, for more than a decade.  A general beat writer/reporter and entertainment/film critic, she is also an accomplished news/investigative news/crime reporter and submitted for Pulitzer Prize consideration "Cops Conspire to Deep Six Sex Assaults" in the Breaking News Category and was persuaded to withdraw the submission. Ms. Walker has completed five award-winning screenplays "The Six Sides of Truth," "The Assassins of Fifth Avenue," "The Wednesday Killer," "The Manhattan Project," and the sci-fi thriller "Project 13: The Last Day." She has also published "Unholy Alliances: A True Crime Story," a non-fiction narrative, "Days, Times, Seasons, and Events: A Collection of Poetry & Prose," and "Songs of Freedom: A Collection of Biblical Teachings," which can be purchased here. She is a member of the Authors Guild, the Los Angeles Press Club, the National Writers Union, and a member of the International Federation of Journalists.