California Attorney General Rob Bonta's antitrust war against Paramount is freezing productions and threatening to drive one of Hollywood's last major studios out of the state — and the 200,000 working-class crew members who make their living on those sets are the ones paying the price while politicians posture.
The Directors Guild of America and IATSE, the union representing below-the-line crew members, sent a letter Wednesday to Bonta and Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison pleading for a settlement. Their argument: the prolonged legal fight over Paramount's roughly $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery is already canceling jobs. "We are aware of productions that have been put on hold or canceled altogether, leading to further reductions in available work for our members and other industry workers," the letter states.
Bonta led a coalition of 12 states to sue and block the merger in July, claiming illegal consolidation in basic cable and theatrical distribution. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order pausing the deal and set a trial date for March 2027 — four months later than Paramount wanted. Bonta has said he's not interested in "behavioral" remedies like pledging minimum output, demanding instead a "structural" fix that Paramount has refused to entertain.
The unions aren't endorsing the merger. DGA national executive director Russell Hollander and IATSE international president Matthew Loeb concede that mergers "historically offer few benefits to workers." But they argue the alternative — a year of frozen operations while the case drags on — is worse. Their proposed conditions include keeping Paramount and Warner Bros. as separate studios producing at least 15 films a year each, maintaining current levels of content licensing from outside producers, and committing to keep Paramount based in Los Angeles.
That last condition is no accident. Paramount's board has already approved a plan to move the studio out of California if Bonta refuses settlement talks by October 1, according to the New York Post. Ellison told top executives the company would relocate to Tennessee, Texas, or Georgia — all right-to-work states with lower taxes — if the attorney general won't come to the table.
The union letter puts IATSE and the DGA directly at odds with the Writers Guild of America, which filed its own lawsuit to block the deal, and SAG-AFTRA, which adopted a resolution backing the WGA's position. The Teamsters also called on the Justice Department to block the merger — which it declined to do. So the industry's own labor leadership is split, with the unions representing the people who actually build the sets and run the cameras lining up against the writers and performers who want the deal killed outright.
Follow the money. Bonta gets a headline-grabbing antitrust crusade. The WGA gets to signal its opposition to corporate consolidation. Meanwhile, the crew members who drive to work before dawn are watching jobs evaporate and a major employer threaten to leave the state entirely. The Hollywood Reporter noted that even theater chains Regal and AMC have endorsed the merger, while the trade group Cinema United opposes it — another fault line where the interests of working people and institutional advocates diverge.
The question nobody in Bonta's office is answering: what exactly does California gain if it "wins" this fight and drives Paramount to Nashville or Atlanta? The politicians keep their talking points. The lawyers keep billing. The crew members lose their livelihoods.
