**David will start to owe Ticking Fee's to investors** so he is already about to start accumulating debt he can't service. If this all fails he will have to give 7.2B to WBD and Zaslav will return it to investors and immediately chop WBD up for parts which Netflix will come in and buy out parts they want (although I imagine in a sale like this, Apple, Amazon, Sony, and others might want some of those parts). Either way David pays more to WBD in both scenarios and in the latter one, hopefully someone like Apple who IMO has taken care of franchises gets ahold of HBO (best outcome in my opinion).
The Paramount threat to leave California reminds me a lot of what Oracle did, except I think Paramount would have a much bigger problem.
Oracle famously moved its headquarters from the Bay Area to Austin in 2020. But here's the part people forget: the employees largely didn't move with it.
By 2024, Oracle reportedly still had around 6,900 office employees in California compared with only about 2,500 in Texas. Oracle changed where the headquarters was located, but it didn't magically transplant decades worth of Bay Area talent to Austin. They eventually announced that their future "world headquarters" would be Nashville anyway.
And that's a tech company, an industry where a huge percentage of the workforce can theoretically work from almost anywhere.
Now apply that to Paramount.
David Ellison is reportedly threatening to move Paramount out of California if the state doesn't settle its challenge to the WBD merger. He has talked about roughly 30,000 Southern California jobs being tied to the combined company. There are also reports that Paramount could look at Texas, Georgia, Tennessee or another state.
But what does "move Paramount" actually mean?
Moving the corporate headquarters is easy. Change the address, move some executives, build a new campus and collect whatever tax incentives another state is offering.
Moving Paramount as an actual movie and television studio is something completely different.
You're talking about writers, directors, actors, editors, producers, VFX people, costume departments, set designers, sound engineers, camera crews, agents, lawyers, vendors, post-production houses, sound stages and an entire ecosystem that has developed around Los Angeles for generations.
How many of those people are actually going to pack up their families and move to Austin because Paramount tells them to?
Oracle is probably the better example of what would actually happen. A percentage move. Some take relocation packages. Some quit. Some stay behind. Some of your best people simply go work for Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Sony, Universal or another production company rather than uproot their lives.
Except Paramount has an even bigger problem than Oracle did because Hollywood isn't just a collection of corporate employees. It's an entire labor and production ecosystem.
That's why I think the threat is much more believable as corporate leverage than as "Hollywood is moving to Texas."
Paramount absolutely could move its legal headquarters. It could move executives. It could build sound stages somewhere else. Productions already shoot all over Georgia, New Mexico, Canada and the UK.
But recreating the concentration of people and infrastructure that exists in Los Angeles is a completely different proposition.
And if Ellison genuinely means moving most of the company rather than just changing the address on the letterhead, I think the Oracle experience should be a warning: companies can move headquarters much more easily than they can move the people who actually make the company work.
For a movie studio, that distinction seems pretty important.