They’re Talking!: Paramount & AGs Settlement Talks Set For Next Month; Bonta Downplays Significance As “Standard Course”

Trick or treat? Paramount Skydance and the coalition of a dozen state Attorneys General fighting to stop David Ellison‘s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros Discovery will be having settlement talks after all. Well, with the Writers Guild of America in the mix too, settlement-ish talks, Under the routine procedure of the federal court system, a judge in Oakland today instructed the battling parties to sit down together for “two consecutive days in the end of October” The ” in-person settlement conference” is scheduled to start at 10 am PT in a month and a half, per Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson. Those end of October dates were determined in a virtual hearing held earlier today before Hixson with the legion of lawyers and assistant AGs dialing in. Watch on Deadline To make sure the two day settlement talks do become dominated by everyone killing time scrolling on their phones to look at the stock market and pre-midterms polls, the judge told the firms and the states to put together a schedule and get it to him by EOD September 15 — which means Para’s gang better not party too hard at the Emmys. Of course, none of this changes the fact that a Paramount disputed antitrust trial is still set to start on March 2, 2027. In fact, none of this means much at all unless Team Para, WBD and the AGs led by California’s Rob Bonta actually want to put their swords down and strike a deal, “structural remedies” and all. To that, Bonta’s office Friday bluntly told Deadline: . “A court-ordered settlement conference means the judge required both sides to meet, but it does not indicate a settlement is in progress. This is standard course in a case of this magnitude.” Burned in the latest attempt at settlement talks that was supposed to take place at the end of August after the reelection seeking Bonta accused them of leaking details of preliminary convos to the media, Paramount were silent today when contacted by Deadline for reaction to Judge’s Hixon’s order In that context, the Halloween-ish ordered sit-down comes just over a month after the September 25 deadline the Supreme Court has set for the anti-ParaBros gang of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington to submit a response to an effort by red states Iowa and Montana to defang the blue state’s July 13 filed antitrust action. Add to that bottleneck, the SCOTUS deadline is just one day after the dozen blue states are set to argue against the David Ellison-owned Para’s desire for a $1.88 billion bond in front of a federal judge in Oakland. At the end of September a $7 million a day ticking fee to Warner Bros Discovery shareholders kicks in for a unhappy Paramount.. That ticking fee, which is the basis of Paramount’s protest of “extraordinary losses” out of the court case and that 2027 trial start date and has seen the company leaking they could leave the West Coast for redder pastures, adds up to over $635 million a quarter. A sum that is neither chump nor Trump change for the POTUS pal Ellison and his Oracle founding and ParaBros-backing father Larry Ellison — even though they are some of the richest people on the planet.