Mike Schur: The Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Is Existential for Writers

Let’s begin with a statement of fact: mega mergers in Hollywood are bad for writers. They’re also bad for actors and directors, for production designers and caterers, for carpenters and Teamsters and electricians and set decorators. They are bad for consumers, who get fewer choices in entertainment controlled by fewer bosses with narrower worldviews. Mergers are bad for local businesses, who lose paying customers from disappearing productions. They are bad for high level TV and film executives, and entry-level assistants, and everyone in between.

They’re bad for everyone except those at the very top – the billionaires who saddle the new companies with debt and profit handsomely from the pain the rest of us feel.

Whatever else you hear or read about the intentions behind the Paramount – Warner Bros. Discovery merger, this must remain front of mind. When a giant company – one of the mere handful of large media companies left in Hollywood – eats another giant company, fewer shows and movies get made, and tens of thousands of skilled Hollywood tradespeople either get fired or can no longer find work.

For that reason, my position is not about personal connections to one company or another, my feelings about the moguls who run them, or those moguls’ political affiliations. While I don’t often work with Paramount or Warner Bros. Discovery, I’d be writing these same words, with the same intensity, if I did. This is about another potential broadsword blow to an already wounded industry, one that’s been gouged and squeezed and strangled by high-level corporate greed.

When Paramount’s plan to acquire WBD was announced, writers again felt the walls closing in. We know what this merger will mean — one less buyer for our work, less demand for writing services, less leverage to negotiate deal terms that recognize our value, less creative latitude. (This isn’t theoretical – it all happened just seven years ago, when Disney ate Fox.) The impact will be concrete, measurable, and serious. That’s why I added my voice to the WGA’s lawsuit to block the merger by sharing my experiences in more than twenty-five years of navigating this industry.

To be clear, I personally have had about a good a professional run as anyone over the last twenty years. I write this only to point out the obvious: if someone in my position has witnessed, and been affected by, the harms of unchecked media consolidation, that means everyone has. And many to a far worse degree.

When I began my career, the major television studios operated as relatively distinct entities. Each was affiliated with a broadcast network or cable outlet, but still capable of selling projects to a wide range of buyers, which created genuine competition. This is how markets are supposed to operate, something politicians and pundits seem to forget as they champion one harmful merger after another. But over the past two-plus decades, that competitive structure has broken down as companies became more horizontally consolidated (the companies devouring each other to create megacompanies) and vertically siloed (only buying content from within the walls of their own building).