Maybe Paramount-Warner SHOULD Leave L.A.

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.

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. Related Stories Business Tom Cruise Blesses Paramount's Deal to Buy Warner Bros., in the Name of Movie "Abundance" TV 'Tulsa King' Season 4 Trailer, Premiere Date Revealed as Showrunner Changes Yet Again

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

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.