Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of TNT Sports parent company Warner Bros. Discovery is on hold for at least 14 days following a judge’s order Monday, but the media megadeal could also soon grow far more expensive.
A week after a dozen states sued to block the agreement, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California granted the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order. That decision will pause any further progress on the deal by the CBS Sports parent company for a minimum of two weeks, and it also sets up a critical hearing scheduled to begin Aug. 3 on a preliminary injunction that the states seek.
Like many other antitrust cases, that injunction will have massive implications on the entire case, by extension, the merger itself. If the injunction happens, it will almost certainly push any closing past the Sept. 30 date by which Paramount intends to close the WBD deal. Paramount is subject to a $650 million fee for any additional quarter in which the deal doesn’t close. The company, however, had previously intended to complete the deal as soon as this week.
Beyond that, though, antitrust cases that end up with an injunction like this also tend to lead to a dissolution of the entire deal that sparked the legal dispute. As a result, the coming weeks will loom large in whether the Paramount-WBD union will actually happen.
