– While Hollywood debates the deal’s impact on US consumers, Europe’s film ecosystem is facing up to the threats behind the merger
The $110 billion merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery cleared its most significant hurdle in June 2026 when the US Department of Justice gave it the green light. For Hollywood’s talent community, after thousands mobilised against the deal, it was a bitter blow. And in Europe? Filmmakers, producers, cinema operators and cinema professionals (as well as European legislators) face a parallel threat that needs to be the focus of attention.
The merged entity would control an extraordinary amount of production, distribution and streaming power: Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, HBO, Max, Paramount+ and a roster of global franchises. For Europe’s creative industries, already negotiating a difficult landscape of shortened theatrical windows and platform dominance, the stakes could not be higher. Many European film professionals’ associations have raised their concerns.
The most immediate risk for European independent producers is structural. Mergers of this scale routinely result in the consolidation of commissioning and acquisitions departments. Where previously, two major Hollywood studios maintained separate development slates, international co-production deals and European acquisition strategies, the merged entity is expected to rationalise: Paramount executives have themselves projected over $6 billion in cost “synergies”. What makes this particularly alarming for European cinema is that Warner Bros Discovery is not a remote US presence in Europe: it is an active producer and distributor of local-language content in several European markets. The debt burdens that the merger carries make post-merger cost-cutting inevitable, and that pressure will fall on precisely this kind of local production activity, with less investment in national stories, national voices and national talents. For the small and mid-sized European production companies that depend on these relationships, there might be a gap that no other player is positioned to fill.
The risk runs deeper than commissioning budgets: films and series are increasingly consumed through connected TV environments dominated by a handful of global platforms, and European broadcasters already struggle for visibility within them. A merged Paramount/Warner Bros Discovery would create another non-European gatekeeper controlling the full chain – from production, through distribution, to the audience – and it would own the catalogues on which European services depend. Control of one of the largest film libraries in existence, including significant European and local-language titles, being in the hands of a single entity raises serious questions about access, licensing terms and the future of repertory programming across the continent.
The merger also introduces a threat to authors’ rights that has received too little scrutiny. With vastly increased market power, the merged entity might weaken protections for screenwriters, directors and other rightsholders. For European creators negotiating individually with a studio of this scale, the power differential would be severe.
The creation of a combined Max-Paramount+ platform would produce a streaming giant with considerable leverage over European audiences and regulators. Under the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive, streaming platforms operating in Europe are already required to invest a portion of their revenues in European content and to ensure a minimum 30% share of European works in their catalogues. But these quotas can increasingly be fulfilled through vertically integrated, in-house productions, reducing the commercial incentive to acquire rights from independent European producers and distributors, and turning what was intended as a protection for the broader ecosystem into a mechanism that primarily benefits the platform itself. More fundamentally, the merger risks accelerating a trend towards safe, globally exportable content, the kind of franchise filmmaking that travels well but crowds out the national, local and artistically ambitious work that European cinema has long championed. When platforms optimise for scale, cultural diversity tends to be the first to suffer.
European cinema exhibitors have particular cause for concern. US films already account for over 60% of admissions in Europe, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory. Concentrating more “must-have” titles in fewer hands would significantly amplify the merged entity’s bargaining power, threatening cinemas with increasingly rigid commercial terms and reduced programming flexibility. Theatrical exclusivity windows are the foundation of the cinema financing model. A more narrowly concentrated distributor, optimising for streaming, has every incentive to shorten them, reducing the period during which cinemas, and even more acutely independent and arthouse venues, can benefit from major releases.
The European Commission is scrutinising the deal on two tracks: a standard merger review with a provisional 7 July deadline for DG COMP and 14 July for the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, examining the $24 billion in financing provided by sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Two Members of the European Parliament, Emma Rafowicz and Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus, have tabled a formal written question pressing the Commission to assess the merger’s full impact on market concentration, cultural diversity, and the bargaining power of cinemas and independent producers alike. They have also called for consultation of the European Board for Media Services under the European Media Freedom Act, a legal instrument that provides for a specific concentration assessment in the audiovisual sector, separate from and complementary to traditional competition analysis. Europe must view the issue through its own lens in order to protect one of the continent’s most distinctive and most fragile assets.
