Why, what the hell is the point? Why would the average person care about a merger?
When purchasing Paramount, David Ellison published a press release to the Jerusalem Press talking about how he supported the IDF financially. Actor Mark Ruffalo recently reminded people he said this, and Zionist organizations are denouncing him as an "anti-semite" for reminding people of this.
If I were a loyal Spirit Airlines customer, I’d have supported their proposed merger. Similarly, when an artist I love gets greenlit by a major studio, it’s news worth celebrating—they’re getting more resources at their disposal.
(To be clear, I think the Paramount merger is a travesty, but mostly due to corruption rather than anything intrinsic to Hollywood needing protecting.)
When a small studio gets bought by a bigger one, it typically results in more production from the small studio. That’s good if you like their content. They Donny have to waste time shopping films, they’ve already been allocated a budget.
No, you get the small studio forced to produce more, when that is not how art is made. Eventually you milk it dry and it sucks for everyone except the people who walked away with more money from owning things.
Bungie being pushed to produce more didn't make more genre defining games. Same for id.
In fact, thanks to the stupidity of Xbox and Sony, we have very clear evidence very recently that allowing big studios to buy and run small artists is a great way to pump out low quality slop that doesn't even do well financially.
Id is an odd example, though. They seemed to be the most reasonably managed Xbox studio in quality and output. Pretty much every other studio (outside of Obsidian) acquired this decade has barely gotten more than 2 games out post acquisition, but Id is (was?) a solid 3-4 year clip of releases with support for each title.
>allowing big studios to buy and run small artists is a great way to pump out low quality slop that doesn't even do well financially.
Scale definitely matters. When it's a very small team getting publishing deals, it's often exciting, because usually it's just a team that really needs money being thrown money and at worst some milestones and feedback. When it's a somewhat sustainable studio of 20+ devs it starts to get shaky when acquisitions come in and you wonder if corporate will ruin that synergy. By 100+ it really should be a proper studio that can support operations and not be too prone to being gobbled up into another wing of megacorp.
Sure, but quality of those movies go down. Best scenario, studio that made N good movies a year, now makes N good movies plus M bad movies, but more likely big studio will capitalize on small studio name to make bad movies.
Nothing requires this and there are plenty of counterfactuals to this claim.
An artist having to sell their work to distributors and producers every time, versus selling their brand once and then getting carte blanche for a while, both of these are methods with benefits and downside and neither has a monopoly on great work.
> big studio will capitalize on small studio name to make bad movies
Eventually, probably. In the meantime the artist could take time otherwise spent fundraising to do what they do best.
Why not just block that merger? Well, the "non-greed" case for mergers is often that while it may result in a dominant position in a narrowly-defined market ('supermarkets'), they are sometimes needed to preserve the existence of that category as an alternative to another giant that has expanded into a new market, in that case mainly Walmart and to some extent, Amazon, both of which can afford to subsidize something like Ritz Crackers with the profits from selling tires, lawn furniture, or AWS.
You could also consider the Sprint/T-Mobile merger in those terms: Both were circling the drain and really only competing for the most price-sensitive customers, as everyone knew both had inferior service to the other 2 networks. Either or both could have ultimately been liquidated, to the absolute glee of Verizon and AT&T. While it hurts emotionally to think of there being fewer players in that important and specific market of real MNOs, it's true that the MVNOs do seem to be thriving today and, for people who can do even basic research, you can get way better deals (in terms of value and price) on cell phone service today than you could 10 years ago thanks to them, even with fewer 'real' carriers.
Note: None of this is directly relevant to Paramount, which I don't think existentially needs the merger - from either side.
Ah, but then is the argument that we should allow a merger among smaller players because it prevents a narrowly-defined market from being entirely consumed by larger, broader businesses; or should we argue that the larger, broader businesses that can exert influence over large swaths of the market prevent the existence of a competitive marketplace?
But at what point does it become distorting the market? I deeply hate regulations which punish behavior "only for sufficiently succesful" players, and I've seen how the existing "special competition rules for monopolists" lead to endless debates of "but I'm not a monopoly!" and it seems really clear that all of the trillion-dollar-market-cap companies are too powerful (they own too many politicians) to ever let themselves be classified as such, no matter what.
But yes, the only real reaosn to support a merger is I have stock in one of the companies ". For obvious reasons; M&A acquisitions almost always spike the share price.
I imagine those people are quiet about it now.
https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/empresas/2026/08/05/pelea-de...
There's a dozen more across countries and industries if you want them. Stop being discriminatory against your own people as a way to protest HN's US-centricness. Latin America has massive labor unions that routinely have to decide what they are going to do when big corporations are about to merge in ways that will potentially harm labor power. Even more so than in the US, in fact.
Not too dissimilar to the US. But "survive" is harder with the higher cost of Living. And hiring for a new role can take weeks at best. In this particular job market, it's not uncommon for professionals to go 6+ months before landing another role.
Gig are a rising thing in the US, but those are also becoming competitive. And if you can't get enough gigs, you cannot even pay rent.
Because of all of that, the few unions that are left fight harder than ever to try and maintain the jobs as is.
Cry no tears for these leaders.
Don't get me wrong, it will be a big shock short term to artists, as seen the last few years. But in the middle-long term the invisible had fills in the gap. That's the whole point of competition, and why such monopolies harm everyone long term.
Something rubs people the wrong way when Crassus became the richest man in the Roman world after buying up all the fire fighting companies, then using that to extort homeowners to sell at a deep discount when they were on fire. That was followed by many reforms that led to a public firefighters.
It was just over 100 years ago when the US went through its Trust Busting era breaking up the oil, steel, and rail. Ordinary people cared a lot about that. Enough to change the course of presidential elections.
Edit: Also, have you ever complained about how all the TV shows and movies these days seem to be the same? Just endless franchises and remakes and product placement and lowest common denominator slop? Well, a good part of that is due to media consolidation, which makes it harder for smaller independent TV and movie studios to compete. The soon-to-be four companies in America that control 80% of mass media are basically hedge funds.