If Paramount leaves, a lot of people in Hollywood won't have a job on Monday. Bonta will. He'll be fine.
Stephen Moore: Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Joseph Kahn is a Grammy-winning director of music videos starring artists such as Taylor Swift, Eminem and Beyoncé. Last week, he published an op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter warning of the consequences if Paramount leaves California in response to its Attorney General Rob Bonta's antitrust lawsuit against a merger with Time Warner.
A major studio leaving L.A. is a nuclear explosion that creates a chain reaction. Eventually other studios start calculating a zero percent state income tax. The math was already there, and yet the only incentive the politicians are handing them is the incentive to act on it.
California already lost Tesla and SpaceX to Texas. McKesson, Oracle, Chevron, Charles Schwab, CBRE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AECOM, Public Storage. Palantir went to Denver. Yamaha left for Georgia. The [f***ing] owner of In-N-Out now lives in Tennessee. When politicians treat business as the enemy, the question isn't why Paramount would leave. It's why would they stay.
We should ask Attorney General Rob Bonta.
Sixty-eight countries cleared this merger. The European Union cleared it. The U.K. cleared it. China cleared it. The Department of Justice cleared it. Cinema United, the trade group representing 30,000 American screens, begged both sides to settle. IATSE and the DGA wrote their own letter warning that a March 2027 trial guts crews who are already starving. Karen Bass called a press conference to say Los Angeles productions are at a standstill and Angelenos aren't getting paid. Gov. Gavin Newsom quietly told Bonta to find a way out of court. Even Xavier Becerra, Bonta's predecessor as California attorney general - and Newsom's likely successor as governor - wants it settled…It's a quirk of California's dysfunctional political culture that a rogue bureaucrat in Oakland is having his TikTok moment at the expense of 53,000 salaried Paramount-Warners employees and countless working crew. This is a business where a grip finds out on Friday whether he works Monday, where an employee's kid's health insurance depends on hitting hours she doesn't control, where a whole vendor shop dies because three shows didn't get picked up.
Every one of those people lives at the mercy of a credentialed public servant who has never once had his own livelihood depend on a decision going his way, and who has therefore learned that the safest career move is the loud, principled stand that costs him nothing and costs everyone else everything. In the attention economy that rewards the gesture over the outcome, men like Bonta get to be both Judge Ito and O.J., scoring progressive votes while he stabs the film industry to death.
If Paramount leaves, a lot of people in Hollywood won't have a job on Monday. Bonta will. He'll be fine.
Mr. Kahn sounds an awful lot like us.
