The film-industry panic sparked by the news of Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. has been immediate and intense, and in the days immediately after, it was hard to find anyone not named David Zaslav (the head of the studio’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery) who was happy about the prospect. The C.E.O. of the movie-theatre trade group Cinema United called the deal “an unprecedented threat” and the Writers Guild said, “This merger must be blocked.” And the ranks of its opponents included not just antitrust guards, such as Elizabeth Warren, but also one of the industry’s biggest and newest tycoons, David Ellison, whose company, Skydance Media, acquired Paramount (and, with it, CBS) earlier this year, to become Paramount Skydance. He’d been trying to buy Warner Bros. Disco

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