If Paramount–Warner Bros. leaves L.A., it’ll be game over for Hollywood. But David Ellison’s newly merged studios will be fine. Better than fine. Nobody in Burbank actually likes Burbank anyway.

Read more ‘Bucking Fastard’ Review: Kate and Rooney Mara Embrace the Weirdness in Werner Herzog’s Nutty but Thin Tale of Two Sisters Who Behave as One

The infrastructure moves. You can throw up a soundstage in Atlanta or New Jersey, or in a decommissioned ice cream factory outside Austin. The lots get sold, and Mayor Karen Bass rebuilds them for the homeless at $2 million per unit. The executive class transfers, same as any corporate move, and they will discover the scientific phenomenon called “weather.” The deals? Vaporware. Contracts and e-signatures floating in a cloud, which is to say a server farm in Virginia that has never heard of Erewhon.

Moving out of L.A. is more possible than you think, because the real asset isn’t the soundstages and office buildings.

It’s the IP.

Paramount’s and Warners’ combined property holdings are worth $1.67 billion. Meanwhile, their top 10 franchises have grossed $150 billion. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, DC, Game of Thrones, Star Trek. That isn’t a library, that’s a row of perpetual ATM machines. The valuation of Batman alone could buy Wayne Enterprises several times over.

Ellison isn’t overpaying $110 billion for dirt. He’s stealth buying the most undervalued industry in America while everyone else stares at the COVID wreckage and mistakes it for the whole picture.

Meanwhile, the writers and actors warning you about consolidation do not live in the world. If they did, they would understand that nobody spends $110 billion to make less of anything. Corporations don’t merge to shrink. They merge to shove product into every screen, format, territory and Botox hole available. The agenda is more: More product, more work, more profit. More, more, more.

Disney has been eating companies like a fat hyena in a Costco for decades, and the work didn’t contract, it expanded. For every Fox pipeline they shut down, they replaced it with 10 Marvel shows about twerking Hulks. Pre-COVID, we had an explosion of production — so much of it that executives could toss money at Sundance beliefs and greenlight product no sane person would watch. Half these people only had careers because the influx of stock market coupons was so indiscriminate that studios hired anyone with an Instagram or a laptop. The merger and streaming boom created more jobs than any period in the history of the business — many of them platform-filler corporate crimes. That isn’t an opinion, it’s Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies (2023).

The party crashed when COVID literally shut the town down for years, followed by Peak TV overbuild, cord-cutting, streaming losses, rate hikes, two strikes. Then, to the shock of the Gen Z-led merchandising industry, the customer rejected their Bluetooth Sandinista Mickey Mouse dildo and decided it was inappropriate for kids.

Where others see a smashed dildo, David Ellison sees the pieces of a $165 billion 2001 Time Warner/AOL merger for the bargain-basement price of $110 billion. He’s ready to leave where he’s not wanted. He’ll be fine.

However, for L.A., it’d be a death blow. The infrastructure is already suffering with vendors going out of business and crewmembers quitting. If Paramount-Warners leaves, the built-in advantage of being a mecca for filmmakers with access to top talent, props and equipment disintegrates overnight. Studio stockpiles of props, wardrobe, cranes and cameras can truck over to Nashville or Austin. Crews can suddenly live in lower-cost states and afford homes and schools for their kids. They may have to pray to Baby Jesus a little more, but a little Holy Ghost Power never hurt nobody.

This is not 1986, when you have to shoot below the roof of a backlot set. We can extend and digitally enhance anything. Setting up shop in business-friendly, film-friendly cities has no downside if the infrastructure truly moves. Every vendor benefits from the lower cost of living for its employees, especially the struggling working class that no one seems to give a shit about in these culture wars.

Read more MS NOW Doubles Down on Crooked Media, Adding ‘Lovett or Leave It’ to Weekend Lineup (Exclusive)

A major studio leaving L.A. is a nuclear explosion that creates a chain reaction. Eventually other studios start calculating a zero percent state income tax. The math was already there, and yet the only incentive the politicians are handing them is the incentive to act on it.

California already lost Tesla and SpaceX to Texas. McKesson, Oracle, Chevron, Charles Schwab, CBRE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AECOM, Public Storage. Palantir went to Denver. Yamaha left for Georgia. The fucking owner of In-N-Out now lives in Tennessee. When politicians treat business as the enemy, the question isn’t why Paramount would leave. It’s why would they stay.

We should ask Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Sixty-eight countries cleared this merger. The European Union cleared it. The U.K. cleared it. China cleared it. The Department of Justice cleared it. Cinema United, the trade group representing 30,000 American screens, begged both sides to settle. IATSE and the DGA wrote their own letter warning that a March 2027 trial guts crews who are already starving. Karen Bass called a press conference to say Los Angeles productions are at a standstill and Angelenos aren’t getting paid. Gov. Gavin Newsom quietly told Bonta to find a way out of court. Even Xavier Becerra, Bonta’s predecessor as California attorney general — and Newsom’s likely successor as governor — wants it settled.

Everyone who actually works in this business wants this resolved, except for the writer who fears David Ellison will never buy their screenplay Luigi Mangione in Love.

It’s a quirk of California’s dysfunctional political culture that a rogue bureaucrat in Oakland is having his TikTok moment at the expense of 53,000 salaried Paramount-Warners employees and countless working crew. This is a business where a grip finds out on Friday whether he works Monday, where an employee’s kid’s health insurance depends on hitting hours she doesn’t control, where a whole vendor shop dies because three shows didn’t get picked up.

Every one of those people lives at the mercy of a credentialed public servant who has never once had his own livelihood depend on a decision going his way, and who has therefore learned that the safest career move is the loud, principled stand that costs him nothing and costs everyone else everything. In the attention economy that rewards the gesture over the outcome, men like Bonta get to be both Judge Ito and O.J., scoring progressive votes while he stabs the film industry to death.

If Paramount leaves, a lot of people in Hollywood won’t have a job on Monday. Bonta will. He’ll be fine.

Joseph Kahn is the Grammy-winning director behind some of the biggest music videos of the past three decades, working with everyone from Taylor Swift and Britney Spears to Eminem, Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. His feature credits include Torque, Detention, Bodied and Ick. He also is an enthusiastically unfiltered presence on social media.

This story appeared in the Sept. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Read more Chris Langham, BAFTA-Winning ‘The Thick of It’ Actor Convicted of Child Sex Offences, Dies at 77