Mark Ruffalo warned of “devastating” effects on film, TV and the news media if Paramount Skydance completes its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Ruffalo, who is among more than 3,000 Hollywood signatories as of Wednesday of an open letter seeking to block the deal, spoke Wednesday via videoconference at a hearing called by Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. Booker noted that none of his Republican Senate colleagues were in attendance.
“We do not have to watch ‘Citizen Kane’ or read ‘1984’ to understand that the concentrated oligarchic control this merger represents is a threat to free press, an informed populace and democracy itself,” Ruffalo said.
Ruffalo cited claims by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison that the combined company will release 30 films per year and give artists “more avenues” of work. Ruffalo said: “Don’t trust empty promises from billionaires driven by greed and corrosive ideology. Don’t trust that this new company will somehow make more films with less money and so much more debt.” Rather, said Ruffalo, you should “trust competition.”
“The merger threatens more than our livelihoods,” Ruffalo said. “It threatens one of the world’s most vital industries.” The pending merger comes “at the worst possible moment” for the industry, the actor and producer said, citing a sharp decline in L.A. entertainment jobs in recent years: “I can personally say that Los Angeles right now is hanging by a thread.”
The Paramount-Skydance merger in August 2025 resulted in 2,000 layoffs, Ruffalo said. “The pattern is documented and predictably repeats in merger announcements, promises of efficiencies, then mass layoffs and production cuts,” he said. It’s predictable in the case of the proposed Paramount-WBD deal “because it’s backed by an enormous amount of debt.”
Ruffalo said “tens of thousands” of media professionals will be at risk of losing their jobs as the Ellisons and their Middle Eastern investment partners — the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi — “try to squeeze every penny out of this massive entity.”
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Ruffalo also noted that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last month said “The sooner David Ellison takes over [CNN], the better,” raising concerns about news organizations kowtowing to the Trump administration. (Ellison has said that CNN’s editorial independence will “absolutely be maintained.”)
According to Ruffalo, one of the winners of the Paramount-WBD deal is Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. The exec is set to receive compensation of at least $550 million with the closing of the pact — a massive payout, Ruffalo claimed, “for basically crushing Warner Bros. to the point where they were carrying so much debt they had to sell it. … It’s obscene.”
Booker had invited Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison to speak at the hearing. However, the company said Ellison was unable to attend because he was attending a funeral of recently deceased family member.
Paramount Skydance’s pending $111 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, clinched after Netflix walked away from a bidding war, still requires regulatory and WBD shareholder approval. It’s not clear whether the “shadow hearing” Wednesday organized by Booker (and other efforts opposing the Paramount-WBD tie-up) will result in greater regulatory scrutiny or conditions on the merger. State attorneys general, including California’s Rob Bonta, are reviewing the deal and may try to block it in court.
The debt-fueled merger would give Paramount Skydance, parent of CBS, CBS News, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, BET, Nickelodeon and more, control over WBD’s portfolio that includes HBO and HBO Max, Warner Bros.’s movie and TV studios, DC, CNN, TBS, TNT, HGTV and Discovery+.
Also speaking at the Senate hearing Wednesday was Michael Isaac, director of legal services at the Writers Guild of America East. The union reps 18,000 creative professionals including employees at TV networks and online news outlets.
Today, there are six major buyers of scripted film and TV content produced by WGA members, Isaac said: Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Warner Bros., Paramount and NBCUniversal. “If Warner merges with Paramount, that combined company would immediately become the largest employer of our members — a media behemoth with tremendous leverage to reduce content, raise prices, increase control of production, suppress competition, worsen working conditions and silence the voices of our members,” Isaac said.
Isaac continued, “At the same time, Paramount is poised to dominate the news business, by controlling both CBS News and CNN. The outcome is not hard to predict because we have already seen the transformation of CBS News in the wake of its merger with Skydance. Under the new leadership, CBS imposed mass layoffs and, we believe, sought to appease bad-faith and partisan critics instead of standing by its journalists that built its reputation.”
Others testifying about the proposed pact — and raising alarms about the megadeal — were documentary filmmaker David Borenstein (director of Oscar-winning “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”); Katie Phang, attorney, legal analyst and former host of “The Katie Phang Show”; and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder and executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and member of the steering committee of Jane Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment.
Senators who spoke — again, there were only Democrats in attendance — included Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
“When monopolies like this run rampant, costs go up, I would tell every American consumer,” Schumer said. “Competition goes down. Competition both in the creative world, but also in the information world, which so many of these entities have a great deal of say [over] and a great deal of control. Innovation dies. Independence is weakened. So if you’re frustrated by high streaming fees, this merger is a nightmare. Fees will keep going up folks, while the incentives to improve services to customers go down.”
Schumer also said the proposed Paramount-WBD merger “reeks of corruption and political manipulation.”
“Donald Trump said he wanted to be ‘involved in deciding the outcome,’” said Schumer. “That’s outrageous in itself. And then everyone should be asking, were there any backroom promises made? … David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, is a big Trump ally, just like his father, and if this merger happened, the right wing will continue to take greater control of America’s largest media companies and suffocate independent voices.”
The hearing, which ran for nearly 2.5 hours, was held at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.
From Variety US