'Primetime' Stumps and Astounds

All right, Anthony, we have a massive piece of news to start us off up at the top.

And it's not an easy one to understand completely and fully.

I'm talking about the Warner Bros and Paramount merger that has been going on for, I don't even remember now, It seems like at least every week there is one new piece of news, one more wrinkle.

This last week, the particular wrinkle has been Paramount settling with various states.

There's been a whole debacle around states being upset around how much Paramount would be taking on if they did merge with Warner Bros., I don't understand business much, so I'm just going to go through what the settlement ended up bringing forth, if that makes sense.

Most of it is relatively good news in the world of we don't really want a merger to happen anyways.

The things that they came up with are not terrible.

First of all, while David Ellison threatened to leave California, he has promised to not leave, that he will not sell the Warner Brothers lot, nor the Paramount lot in California, which is good news for everyone working on those lots.

Paramount will also invest an additional $300 million on film production in the U.S. annually, which is great.

And it is obligated to release at least 30 films theatrically per year, which is a lot for a studio that has released three movies this last year.

But, you know.

Making movies put into theaters.

I can't complain about that.

It also agreed to have a third party entity to oversee operations for CNN and CBS News in the hopes that by having someone else brought in to oversee that a little bit.

people won't be as concerned about particular ideas or particular leanings influencing news.

Again, this is something that I have been watching from afar and not really engaging with just because it is all lots of business talk and I don't understand it.

Neither of us are a particular fan that a merger is happening at all.

However, at this point, it's going to happen.

There's nothing really to be done about it.

If Paramount cannot, someone else will come in afterwards anyways, so it's going to happen.

So in this timeline where this thing is happening, the best that I'm hoping for is that something good comes out of it, that we get some good movies.

I hope that David Ellison, who has said over and over that he loves movies a lot, so I'm hoping...

That he lives up to that reputation and that he brings us a bunch of really good movies after this all goes through.

At this point, I'm just hoping for this, I don't know, nightmare is a strong word, but I'm hoping that this nightmare is over soon and that we can move forward with hopefully bringing really good stories to the big screen.

Yeah.