Ari Emanuel is throwing his weight behind Paramount‘s pending $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, blasting the antitrust lawsuit against it as “trash” in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

From the headline arguing the merger “could save Hollywood” to its coda urging government regulators to let creatives “get back to trying to rip each other’s heads off,” the piece is a strong endorsement at a key moment. Once widely considered a cinch to close over the summer, the deal has been put into limbo by the suit by 12 state attorneys general. After clear signs that a judge was skeptical of its defense, Paramount decided to agree to go to trial and not to close the deal before June 1, 2027, or a favorable ruling, whichever comes first.

Emanuel, CEO of TKO Group Holdings and longtime former super-agent who build Endeavor into a major force in Hollywood, is not without conflict in the legal battle. TKO’s UFC last year became one of the first beneficiaries of Paramount’s new ownership when the David Ellison-run company paid $7.7 billion for rights to the mixed-martial arts circuit.

The tagline used to identify Emanuel to Journal readers says only that he is “executive chair and CEO of TKO, which does business with movie studios.” It also declines to note that he is executive chair of WME Group, corporate parent of major agency WME.

The attorneys general “say they are protecting competition. Their actions threaten to destroy it,” Emanuel warns.

“You know an antitrust case is trash when it ignores some of the fastest-growing competitors in the market,” he writes. The plaintiffs “pretend Amazon MGM, A24 and Lionsgate don’t exist and that Netflix isn’t leaning into theatrical films with its coming release of Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew (which I suspect will whet its appetite for more).”

In the theatrical movie arena, the claims in the complaint about concentration do not “remotely reflect reality,” Emanuel insists.

Addressing one of area of controversy, Emanuel says studio theatrical releases compete with YouTube, video games and an array of other screen content. (The lawsuit says the market should be defined as direct competitors in movie releasing, noting that it would effectively collapse two major studios into one.)

“You think I’m letting my client’s horror movie premiere on the same day as a MrBeast video? Or the release of the latest Call of Duty? Or when Netflix drops Wednesday? Think again,” the exec writes. “The attorneys general don’t get to ignore the platforms that compete every day for audiences, talent, capital and content just because it makes their case harder. Believe me, as somebody who’s in those rooms, every green light, marketing budget and release date is decided against the reality of that broadly competitive environment.”

The complaint’s monopoly assertion about cable network concentration, an issue that has surprisingly come to the fore in the case a decade after pay-TV’s peak, involves the same “sleight of hand,” Emanuel contends. “This might have been a good argument in 2005 but is absurd in a world of fast-shrinking cable subscriptions and the rise of streaming, which has transformed both consumer behavior and the bargaining environment.”

Netflix has narrowly become UK audiences’ first port of call.

According to Ofcom’s latest Media Nations report, 26% of UK viewers in 2025 said the streamer is where they turn to first when thinking about what to watch, ahead of the BBC on 25% and well up on ITV (15%) and YouTube (10%).

The figures mark a shift from the prior year, which was 28% for the BBC and 23% for Netflix, although an Ofcom spokeswoman said there have been some changes in methodology so these numbers are indicative only.

Broken down by age, the figures shift vastly, with 36% of 16-24 year olds opting for Netflix first over just 14% for the BBC. At the other end of the age scale, 5% of over-75s choose Netflix first while 48% switch on the 100-year-old national broadcaster.

The regulator’s research comes after several years of Netflix making big UK hits like Adolescence, The Gentlemen and Baby Reindeer. The BBC, meanwhile, is renegotiating its funding model and has floated forcing streaming subscribers to pay the £180 ($240) TV licence fee even if they don’t watch the BBC.

Ofcom’s research also found that more adults associate Netflix with “high quality content,” “content that is relevant to me” and “creative content” than the BBC, with YouTube topping the corporation on the latter. The BBC ranked higher than Netflix and YouTube in areas like “content that offers a different point of view from my own.”

Thankfully for the BBC, far more adults still associate it with British drama (66%) than Netflix, although given the streamer is American, Netflix executives may have been quietly impressed by its figure of 24%, which was only just behind the UK’s Channel 5 (now 5) on 28%.

In particular, 2025 saw a “pronounced” number of older viewers flock to drama on streaming platforms, Ofcom found, with average hours watched by audiences over the age of 75 skyrocketing by 56% to 36 hours per person per year, while for 55-74 year olds the figure rose 28% to 85 hours per person per year.

The BBC and Netflix were neck-and-neck for most-watched content of 2025 at four apiece in the top 10, with KPop Demon Hunters topping the list with 24.4 million viewers, ahead of Adolescence with 16 million for its most-watched episode and the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors at 14.8 million.

The streamers also had a good year financially in the UK. Revenues for these big players shot up 18% to £5.2B, which Ofcom put down to “subscription price increases rather than subscriber growth.” During this period, the proportion of advertising tier subscribers to the likes of Netflix and Disney+ rose rapidly, Ofcom said. Pay-TV revenues were also up 4% to £6.2B.

Third-party spend record

Last year was dominated by chatter around a scripted co-production crisis but in the end 2025 proved a record year in terms of third-party funding for broadcaster content.

This figure rose by more than 10% to £748M, with high-profile examples including the BBC and Prime Video’s The Night Manager and Richard Gadd’s new show Half Man for the BBC and HBO. Third-party funding doesn’t only incorporate co-productions but includes the lucrative UK high-end TV tax credit and distributor advances.

Unsurprisingly, the majority (around two thirds) of third-party spend went on drama but there were increases in lower-budget genres like factual and children’s.

Despite the 2025 record, Ofcom said “challenges” remain with third-party funding as “the global streaming market continues to prioritise projects with international appeal and full rights ownership.”

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association sued Penske Media Group on Tuesday, alleging that the company engaged in a scheme to fraudulently acquire the Golden Globe Awards and gain control over the awards market.

The 113-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleges monopolization, unlawful restraint of trade, unfair trade practices and fraudulent misrepresentation among other claims. Also named as defendants in the lawsuit are Jay Penske, CEO of Penske Media, as well as the Golden Globe Foundation and its CEO, Gregory Goeckner.

The litigation is rooted in the controversy that swirled around the HFPA in 2021, when the Los Angeles Times published an investigation into the organization, pointing out its lack of diversity and instances of self-dealing. The firestorm over the story led to publicists announcing a boycott of the ceremony, causing NBC to drop the telecast the following year.

In 2023, the Globes were acquired by Dick Clark Productions, owned by PMC, and Todd Boehly’s Eldridge. At the time, a new non-profit, the Golden Globes Foundation, was formed, as the HFPA was dissolved. The lawsuit identifies the plaintiff HFPA as a 501(c)(6) non-profit, with reports last year that a group of foreign journalists sought to reconstitute the association.

The lawsuit claims that Boehly used the boycott as a “pretext” to “infiltrate the HFPA and acquire the Golden Globes,” as he became the interim CEO of the press association. The lawsuit claims that Boehly, and then-HFPA president Helen Hoehne and then-general counsel Goeckner, championed the transaction that would transfer control to DCP and Eldridge. Hoehne, who is now president of the Golden Globes, was not named as a defendant.

The lawsuit claims that the HFPA members were “compelled to approve the transaction in a sham process tainted by fraud, conflicts of interest, and myriad breaches of fiduciary duty.” It claims that Goeckner incuded the HFPA’s treasurer to transfer $4 million from the association’s reserve to the Golden Globes Foundation.

The suit claims that Hoehne, Goeckner and Boehly concealed Penske’s involvement, and that he assumed complete control three months after the agreement was signed.

The litigation also claims that PMC has obtained monopolies in three markets, including Hollywood trade publications, secondary awards and for-your-consideration advertising. The lawsuit claims that Penske and Boehly have tried to exclude the HFPA and its members from these markets and “deprive the HFPA and its members of business opportunities and their ability to protect and promote the interests of foreign journalists, and reduce competitive output in favor of the journalists who work for Penske’s trust.”

The lawsuit claims that, in the furor over the HFPA in 2021, PMC media outlets like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter “participated in a media campaign that disparaged and criticized the HFPA and accused the organization of, among other things, lacking diversity.” Deadline, which is also owned by PMC, is named as a non-party in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims that the defendants “continue to conspire in an attempt to force the HFPA to dissolve before their malfeasance can be fully investigated and exposed. Indeed, just days before the filing of this Complaint, Penske and Boehly, through their corporate enterprises, formally offered to GGF members extended Golden Globes voting rights and ballroom seats at the Golden Globes, but expressly stated that those benefits were contingent on — among other things — the HFPA dissolving and the GGF affirmatively assisting Penske and Boehly to make that happen.”

A spokesperson for the Golden Globes said, “Today’s lawsuit continues the absurdity and irrationality that the industry has come to expect from the defunct organization formerly known as the HFPA. The Golden Globes transaction closed more than three years ago and received all required approvals — any assertion that it did not close, or remains subject to reversal, is once again unequivocally false.  

The spokesperson added, “This latest act of duplicity is a new low, even for the HFPA. The attempt by former HFPA members to leverage the Golden Globe Foundation, an independent nonprofit, simply to secure Golden Globes tickets is an unfortunate distraction that inappropriately diverts resources from legitimate charitable causes. We remain troubled that the HFPA, an organization so widely criticized for ethical failures, non-inclusivity, racism, and misconduct involving talent, continues to find attorneys willing to push such illegitimate claims.”

The HFPA in 2010 sued Dick Clark Productions, its longtime producer, over the rights to the telecast. That led to a lengthy trial in which a federal judge sided with DCP over its rights to the show, and an eventual settlement in 2014.