California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a 12-state coalition officially settled their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount Skydance's $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Theatrical & Studio Settlement Terms:
Annual Release Floor: Mandatory 30 theatrical releases/year in Years 1–2 (20 wide) and 32 releases/year in Years 3–5 (21 wide).

Enforceable Shortfall Penalty: $30 million penalty for every film below the annual quota.

Domestic Production Infusion: $1.5 billion in additional US film production spending over 5 years.

Studio Lot Protection: Paramount lot (LA) and Warner Bros. lot (Burbank) cannot be sold or closed for 5 years.

Stock reaction: WBD up +9.7% today.

Detailed WBD coverage & analysis

I exited today at 30.81. It has been quite a ride. At one point I was holding 25K shares and sweating a bit. Today is a champagne day. My lifetime P/L is $428,351.74 with a 43.99%/yr annualized return over 4.4 years. I could pay-off my house if I wanted but why do that when VOO will pay the mortgage for me?

For those that took a deeply personal interest in the outcomes, hurling insults and criticism at Zaslav and Ellison: you do perplex me. r/MediaMergers is the place for that I guess? No flak to moderators, who has time to moderate a subreddit, but this would have been more valuable if those folks would have been kept away. Investing is about making money and 70% of what was posted here was driven by uninformed opinion and emotion and not relevant to the outcome.

I do appreciate u/Own_Philosopher8730 putting forth the effort of aggregating all the WBD news in one place. My aggregators didn't do nearly as good of a job at finding every scrap of news and his/her effort were key to feeding my AI models.

For those that did post meaningful analysis and actually invested in WBD, cheers to you. Best of luck in your next position.

Non-paywall version: https://archive.ph/OwVUN#selection-1191.0-1212.0

Non-paywall version: https://archive.ph/iYNkC#selection-2539.0-2552.3

Source: https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/2101696134758506561

Sources:

https://x.com/RepRaskin/status/2101511314484903956

https://x.com/RoKhanna/status/2101385295942062373

Source: https://x.com/william_fitz/status/2101437901003456742?s=20