The Paramount deal was supposed to be done. Skydance Media had spent the better part of two years trying to fold itself into the Paramount Global empire — a transaction worth roughly $8 billion that would have reshaped one of Hollywood's oldest studios and handed control to David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. Suits shook hands. Shareholders largely went along. And then Rob Bonta walked in.
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California's attorney general announced in the final stretch that his office was scrutinizing the deal's terms, zeroing in on whether Paramount's controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, had received an outsized payout that left ordinary investors short-changed. It was a late-stage intervention almost nobody saw coming, and the entertainment industry is still chewing on it. This week, Bonta explained exactly why he did it and what he's watching now.
The merger ultimately closed anyway, but not before Bonta's office extracted what it called meaningful concessions. Whether those concessions actually protect investors, or whether this was California throwing its regulatory weight around in a deal that would have cleared without it, depends heavily on who you ask. Bonta is not apologetic.
The Redstone Problem: Why the AG Went After This Deal Specifically
Paramount Global's ownership structure has always been a little strange. National Amusements, the theater chain controlled by the Redstone family, held a majority of the voting shares even as it owned a small slice of the economic pie. That asymmetry, voting power wildly out of proportion to financial stake, is legal. It also creates situations where a controlling shareholder can cut a deal that works beautifully for her and acceptably, at best, for everyone else.
Bonta's office argued that's exactly what happened. Shari Redstone, who inherited control of National Amusements from her father Sumner Redstone, negotiated a separate, premium arrangement for her shares as part of the Skydance transaction. Shareholders who didn't hold the same class of stock didn't get that arrangement. The AG's office decided that warranted a hard look under California corporate law, which offers protections for minority shareholders in certain transactions. Paramount is incorporated in Delaware but deeply rooted in California, and that hook was enough to make the intervention stick.
According to reporting on the interview, Bonta pushed back hard on the grandstanding charge. He framed it as straightforward consumer and investor protection, the same mandate his office applies to pharmaceutical price-fixing cases or data privacy violations. Hollywood just doesn't usually expect the AG to show up at a closing table.
Skydance's Side: A Done Deal That Almost Came Undone
From Skydance's perspective, the Bonta intervention arrived at the worst possible moment. The company had already navigated a bruising shareholder vote, a competing bid from Sony and Apollo Global Management, and months of negative press about whether the Ellison family was overpaying or underpaying depending on the news cycle. Getting pulled into an AG inquiry in the final hours was not in the timeline.
Skydance isn't a household name to most moviegoers, but its fingerprints are on a staggering number of blockbusters: the rebooted "Top Gun: Maverick," several Mission: Impossible installments, and a string of Marvel-adjacent productions. Its Marin County roots give it a California identity that most production companies lack, which made the state-level scrutiny feel like friendly fire to some in the industry.
The company maintained throughout that the deal was fair, the process was clean, and the separate consideration for Redstone's shares was disclosed and legally sound. Bonta's office didn't ultimately block the transaction, but it slowed things down and, by some accounts, extracted commitments around the treatment of Paramount employees and certain financial disclosures that Skydance might not have volunteered on its own.
The CNN Question and the Bigger Worry Lurking Behind Paramount's Walls
In the same interview, Bonta addressed something the entertainment press has been circling for months: the fate of CBS News and what the Paramount-Skydance merger means for journalism infrastructure in California and nationally. Paramount owns CBS, which owns a news division with deep ties to this state. Local affiliates, investigative units, the works.
The question surfaced partly because of what's happening to CNN, which is mid-sale itself and generating its own anxiety about editorial independence under new ownership. Bonta didn't draw a straight line between the two situations, but the implication was clear enough. California is paying attention to media consolidation in a way it hasn't historically, and the AG's office considers itself a relevant check on deals that could hollow out newsrooms or shift editorial control in ways that hurt the public.
Whether that's a legitimate regulatory function or mission creep dressed up in populist language is a live debate in Sacramento and in every entertainment law firm on the Westside.
What Hollywood Took From All of This
The Bonta intervention set a marker. For decades, California's regulatory apparatus mostly stayed out of entertainment M&A, content to let Delaware courts and federal antitrust reviewers carry the load. This was different. A California AG inserted himself into the mechanics of a deal involving one of the state's most iconic studios, cited California law, and did it publicly enough that the parties had to respond.
Studio executives and entertainment lawyers are quietly gaming out what that means for the next deal cycle. Consolidation pressure in Hollywood isn't going away. Streaming economics have made mid-size studios increasingly hard to sustain as independents, and the dealmakers who circled Paramount are already eyeing other targets. If Bonta, or whoever holds the AG seat next, decides that shareholder structure scrutiny is now standard California procedure, the closing dinners are going to get a lot more complicated.
The Paramount deal closed. The Ellisons got their studio. But Bonta made sure everyone knows the state of California has an opinion about how Hollywood sells itself. That opinion comes with subpoena power.