Bulwark Takes - Damon Lindelof: Hollywood HATES the Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Sonny Bunch and Damon Lindelof—the show runner behind Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen—discuss the growing backlash to the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. merger and what it could mean for Hollywood’s future. Lindelof explains why he joined more than a thousand industry professionals in signing a public letter urging scrutiny of the deal. He describes a “chilling effect” across Hollywood, where even speaking out against consolidation can carry professional risk.Open Letter: 2,500+ Industry Leaders Oppose the Paramount–WBD Mergerhttps://blockthemerger.com/openletter

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Bullwork. My name is Sunny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the Bullwork. And I'm very pleased to be joined today by Damon Lindeloff, who you will know from TV shows like Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen, movies like Prometheus, World War Z, The Hunt. And upcoming, which is pretty relevant to the discussion we're about to have lanterns, which is going to be on HBO Max, which is owned by Warner Brothers. And which is currently in the process of maybe possibly merging, being purchased. by Paramount, which has caused a lot of consternation in the industry. So, Damon, thank you for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. So the reason I wanted to get you on is because you are one of, you are one of more than a thousand Hollywood luminaries and, you know, below the line works, a broad swath of people have signed this letter that has basically said, hey, let's put the breaks on this deal. I just want to read a quick passage from it. We are deeply concerned by indications of support for this merger that prioritize the interests of a small group of powerful stakeholders over the broader public good. The integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry would be grievously compromised.

Competition is essential for a healthy economy and a healthy democracy. So is thoughtful regulation and enforcement. Media consolidation has already weakened one of America's most vital global industries, one that has long-shaped culture and connected people around the world. I reached out to you because you had a great Instagram post talking about your own fear. As you put it fear, your fear of signing this letter, which, you know, jumped out of me because you are in the top one-tenth of one percent of probably most powerful, successful people in the industry. And if even you are afraid to kind of speak up against this, it seems like a real indication that something is wrong with this process, with this merger, with the state of the industry. I think that's right. I hope that's right, or else my fear is very unreasonable and irrational. But I do, I think since we put the letter out yesterday morning, now we're over 2,000 signatures.

So that seems to be an indicator of it's getting a little bit less scary, but I do think that there's safety in numbers. And I think that there's this sort of idea around what we could call the chilling effect. And I think that that feeling of, oh, I want to say something that I feel strongly about. And then instantly that follows, in my case, a wave of nausea, but also sort of your emotions leave your chest and they enter into your head. and your head begins to tell you what would the ramifications be if I spoke out against the idea that these two great companies should come together, especially in my case, my overall deal has been at Warner Brothers since 2012 or 2013, so 13 years now. And my current deal is at HBO.

And so if this deal is as inevitable as everyone says it is, it's very possible that Paramount Skydance becomes my new employer by the end of this year. And then my deal is up early in the early part of 27. So I may not be picked up or renewed or or even worse. The HBO show that I'm currently working on. It's called the chain. The new leadership could take an active interest in this if I'm viewed as a rebel rouser. And then on the other side of it, I feel like part of the creative being a member of the creative community is to sort of speak up when you're worried about something. And certainly that's the culture that's instilled in us as writers. I've been through two strikes.

And I think that when I first entered into the Guild, I was a staff writer. Now I'm a showrunner. And the collective bargaining power is always a direct correlation between how willing the showrunners are to kind of stick their necks out. and speak power to the companies that employ us when we're amongst the coziest with them, you know, and that sort of idea of I'm fully aware of how blessed I am to have achieved like the highest level of my dreams. But the feeling of I'm sitting courtside at a Lakers game, a ticket that I would never ever be able to afford or or pay for out of my own pocket. But the person who I'm sitting

next to is my boss at inside the Warner Brothers Discovery family. And now I will not be not just invited to the Lakers game anymore, but I may not be invited back to my office on the Warner's lot. And I think that those are very, very real considerations, but right on the heels of feeling like, you know, silenced inside my own body, right? Because nobody was telling me to shut up. That made it all the more of a compelling case to sort of sign the letter. Also, I have a wife who's who's 10 times of a better person than I am and she can clarify things down to their simplest most base element which is is this the right thing to do if everyone that you talk to and everyone that we spend time with and hang out with is afraid and worried about what this is going to

do to our business what's the harm in just saying so um and uh I guess the answer is we'll find out the just do the right thing here is such such a key part of it and you know this is kind of a founding idea of the bulwark. This is, you know, kind of why we are here and why, why we are doing what we're doing. And that, that's another thing that really jumped out of me, because in your, in your post and in this letter, it's not even so much the folks at the top who say, well, you know, there's fewer deals for us. The real problem here is that jobs everywhere are going to disappear, below the line jobs everywhere are going to disappear because there will just be fewer productions, right? I mean, that is kind of the, the real worry here is that it's,

It's the simple fact of taking two studios, making them one. They say, oh, we're going to put out 15 movies a year from each studio. Sure. Sure. I believe that entirely. But the reality is that jobs will go away, right? And jobs that aren't visible to the average person. For sure.

And I'm not wagging my finger to anyone and calling them a liar. Let's just assume that everybody's intentions are good and that and that Paramount Skydance and Redbird Capital say that they're going to between Warner Brothers and Paramount they're going to release but we won't even talk about television because it's harder to put a direct number on that but they're saying that they're going to put out 30 movies and that basically accounts for you know back of the napkin math in terms of how many movies Warner released last year and and how many movies Warner a Paramount release next year, just stick them together. But I think that the reason that there's some level of

of doubt bordering on magical thinking is we just sort of saw what happened when Disney bought Fox. And I think that the same well-intentioned rhetoric sort of surrounded that merger. But if you smash the Dodgers and the Yankees into one another, the shortstop should be worried because now there's two short stops. And I think that the fundamental idea of like if you just look at the numbers, right, post Fox Disney merger, it's dropped conservatively almost, you know, over 40% their output, certainly on the film side. They did, you know, before the merger, there were a combined theatrical release between

Disney and Fox. That's on a thousand screens or more. somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 or 25 movies. Now it's 14 combined. So that's 10 less movies. So why is Paramount Warner's going to be any different? And so I think that I want to be a realist. I believe in capitalism. I'm also a kind of a diet in the wool, you know, bleeding heart liberal. But at the same time, I understand that I believe in the free market and I believe in competition. but I think consolidation is really bad for competition. And I feel like Paramount and Warner Brothers,

a compelling argument has not been made for me from a perspective of they had to merge in order to survive. I think Warner Brothers had an incredible year last year. And when Skydance took over Paramount, they were doing quite well too. So I don't necessarily believe that this merger is, it may be good for the share. shareholders. It may be good for some forces of commerce outside the immediate environs of this town.

But for the people who work here, for the people, the crafts people who have made a living at this thing, there's a reason that Josh Tomorrow cut a thousand jobs to just today at Disney. So, so, you know, call it what you want. There's all these buzzwords. Maybe they, they'll say synergies, but there are, or redundancies, which they've stopped, saying because we kind of know what that is, but people are going to get fired. And that makes me really sad. I mean, I think that, look, this is, this was even in the deal memos, right? We're going to reduce this number, this billion's amount of labor functionally, you know, that is just a thing that will, that will obviously end up. Yeah, I think they said six billion. And, and, you know,

and on the Netflix, which was also vying to be to be a buyer, but they actually put the number, you know, closer to the mid-teens, 14 or 15 billion. And by the way, that none of, you know, in all the conversations that I've had about what's happening, no one is really talking about the $79 billion in debt that Paramount Guidance is is accruing in the process of this merger. I know that they're generating revenue. I know that I didn't go to business school. I, you know, I make up stories. I'm not a, I'm not a finance guy. But, you know, that's a big number. Well, whenever I hear the term EBITA, my brain kind of fuzzes out. So I'm with you on that.

But it is true, though. I mean, this is what Warner Brothers has been fighting and they've been trying to pay down their debt. It's a whole thing. Let me, can I ask you what the mood around town is like? I mean, a letter like this doesn't happen with a thousand signatures, including folks like you, Denny Villeneu, like all sorts of, you know, huge big names without there being a lot of real concern and, you know, kind of underground sentiment. What has the feeling been like around town since this has been announced?

This is just one person's perspective, but I, you know, I don't sit behind a laptop in my house and click, clack all day. I'm moving through the world. And I come to the Warner Brothers lot every day as I have, with the exception of the pandemic when we were working from home. and I eat lunch over in the commissary, and I have a sense of how many people are here on the lot at any one time, based on the number of productions that are around, largely based on my metric of how long do I have to wait to buy a burrito at the keto moss inside the commissary. And when that line is short, I get a little bit worried. But I think that the larger issue is, and again, this isn't me saying I wish that Netflix was my new corporate daddy. I would rather have just kept on keeping on with Warner Brothers as a fairly independent

entity and inside HBO, which is independent inside of Warner's, just in terms of feeling like there was some sense of real autonomy, creative autonomy. So I work for Casey Blois and Francesca Orsey and their incredible team at HBO, and they had creative autonomy inside of the Warner Brothers system. And before that, my overall deal was with Peter Rawls. and Channing a Dunjee and their incredible team at Warner Brothers TV. And I felt like they had creative autonomy. There was no real oversight.

And it felt like when Netflix was going to buy Warner's that those entities within Warner still felt like they were going to be autonomous, when it was going to be paramount, something shifted. And I don't know if that's a result of what's happening at CBS News or what implications there may be for CNN. And again, I don't want my political identity. to to to overshadow what what I what I felt the vibes were independent of of anything about the current administration. But I will say it did feel like that autonomy was slipping away,

despite reassurances to the contrary. And I know, I know that Jerry Cardinal said, of Redbird Capitol said in those early days when the takeover was first announced that they had the complete and total support of the creative community. And I wouldn't say that that's entirely true. I would say that the creative community would love to work for Paramount and the creative community would love to work for Warner's. But I don't, I wasn't sensing that the creative community was psyched about them being smashed together. And it, you know, as, as my Gen Z son and his friends would say, uh, the vibes were off. Um, and I think that the answer to the question, why didn't we speak up when it first happened was that there has been a process of diligence.

You know, we've been talking to one another, and I think that there was going to be a tremendous amount of diligence around the Netflix deal at every level of government. You know, the Justice Department was looking at it, antitrust was looking at it, state AGs were looking at it, and then suddenly, when Paramount swept in and it became Paramount, edged out Netflix and Netflix with Drews, all of that diligence went away. So I think a big part of this letter is asking,

estate AG's to look at the deal itself and examine the impacts because it just feels like its inevitability became the buzzword. And for a merger of this magnitude that's going to affect the number of people that it's going to affect, there needs to be some tire kicking before we take this bus out. Let's hit on that regulation question for a second because I do think that this is the real net. What's the next step here? Right. So you sign this letter and I think it's important to get that sense of things out there. I think it's important to get the mood of the industry and the people who work in the industry, the heart of the industry out there. But then the real question is, okay, well, what next? You know, is it, is it we're going to, we're going to ask the

state AGs to do it? We're going to try and get a Democratic Congress in there to do more oversight. Like, what's the, what is the actual next step here? Yeah, I mean, obviously, the current administration wields a tremendous amount of power in both the House and the Senate, but Congressman Adam Schiff had a shadow hearing that Noah Wiley, who also signed our letter amongst others, started to talk about the impacts on our business, about post-consolidation. I know that Senator Booker is having another hearing tomorrow.

So, again, I think that you make noise where you can. Obviously, we would love it if the state AGs looked at the deal. I'm not a lawyer and certainly can't get into the weeds on what is antitrust and what is not antitrust. A lot of it is in the eye of the beholder. I have concerns about the Middle East money, the Saudi money and what kind of influence that that will have on our media, particularly CNN. But if it's all legal, then it's going to go through. But I do think that, yes, the hope is that there will be some form of litigation. That is not just above my area of expertise or pay grade, but it's just outside my realm of knowledge.

I think that one of the things, if I were a state AG, I would want to know what my case was. And so phase one is aggregating, is beginning to dispel the narrative that the town is on board with this merger. and then I'm going to allow them to start to dig up whatever evidence that requires them to potentially litigate. What would that look like, do you think, in terms of like, here's a piece of, here's a story I can tell you about how this is going to negatively impact competition, the industry as a whole, the ability of Americans to enjoy storytelling. Like, what is the, what is the thing that you are looking for here that could, that would

really change things, do you think? I think that's a great question and one that I should have a better answer for than the one I'm about to give you, which is, I think that there's an obvious intuitive impact on the people who work in this town. And I'm not talking about just the actors and the writers and the luminaries, as you put it, who are at the bold of this letter. But I would say, you know, the other 1950 signatures are all people who are going to be deeply impacted. And understanding that they've been getting squeezed for any number of reasons over the course of the last two decades, not the least of which is AI. And so this is not all Paramount Skydance is fault. There's an inevitable thing that's happening to our business that they have no control over.

But I think the consolidation certainly speeds the plow. But to your question, from an antitrust or a litigation standpoint, I think that the consumers are going to be hurt. when you when you think about subscriptions or or or access to this material the the the fewer number of people who control the levers of pricing you know that i would feel the same way as i i saw that you know there was going to be that united i think was was potentially uh feeling out um a merger with another airline that that idea of like when there are fewer buyers uh there is less competition. And when there is less competition, the prices basically get set by fewer people. And I feel like that puts a real squeeze on the consumer. And so I think that, like, looking at it

from not just the angle of the front of the pipeline where we're making this thing, but the back of the pipeline, once it exists, and it lives in a tile on your television screen and what you have to pay for when you click that tile when when one company uh not only controls you know major media uh conglomerates and news organizations but also the NFL and also the UFC um they can you know they can they can they can start to kind of set whatever price point they want i i can just say as somebody who has recently totaled up what those tiles cost me it's already out of control it's already it's it's uh luckily i can write most of it off on my taxes um Damon, thank you so much for hopping on.

Thank you for filing your taxes. Well, I'm done. I'm out. Guys, file your taxes. Don't let all of our rebellious anti-corporate speak prevent you. You have one day left to file your taxes. You don't want to go to jail. That's no good for any way.

Damon, thank you for being on with me. I really appreciate it. I appreciate it. Big fan. And please tell Sarah Longwell that I love her podcast. and I want a focus groupie mug. I will. I will definitely do that.

And if you like this podcast, if you like everything else we do, hit like, subscribe and all that stuff, make sure you sign up at the bulwark.com. We've got all sorts of great stuff over there. So see you guys next time.