Over a thousand people in Hollywood signed a letter this week. Not a tribute to a fallen colleague, not a pay dispute. An open letter of opposition, published on a website called BlockTheMerger.com and in the New York Times, addressed to regulators and shareholders, carrying one message: stop this Warner Bros. deal.
The deal is Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which would fold two of Hollywood’s biggest studios into a single corporate body and shrink the number of major US film studios from six to four. Joaquin Phoenix signed the letter. So did Jane Fonda, Denis Villeneuve, David Fincher, Bryan Cranston, JJ Abrams, Kristen Stewart, Emma Thompson, Mark Ruffalo, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, among hundreds of others. The industry is scared enough to say so publicly, which tells you something about the moment.
For audiences in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Johannesburg, this might read like a rich industry’s internal argument. It isn’t. The outcome of this merger will shape the infrastructure through which African stories reach the world, and African creators should be watching it as closely as anyone in Burbank.
The economic fear inside Hollywood is real and grounded in recent history. When Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019 for $71.3 billion, what followed was layoffs, a narrower development slate, and the slow death of the mid-budget film. Studios stopped financing the projects that used to sit between superhero spectacles and micro-budget arthouse releases. Those middle-ground dramas and comedies were what kept writers, directors of photography, editors, and crew members consistently working. Two studios becoming one means two development slates becoming one. The Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof put it plainly on Instagram: when two storied backlots end up under the same ownership, one becomes a ghost town. Paramount has already acknowledged the merger will require significant cuts to eliminate duplication.
African filmmakers and content creators are not spectators to that dynamic. They are directly inside it. Warner Bros. and its streaming arm HBO Max have been among the more active international studios in acquiring and distributing African-originated content in recent years. The kind of deal that gets a Nollywood co-production in front of a global subscriber base, or that funds a first-look agreement with an African production house, tends to come from mid-level studio infrastructure: development executives with international mandates, acquisitions budgets that aren’t solely chasing IP-driven tentpoles. When studios merge and cut, those mandates are the first to go. They’re considered overhead rather than core business. African content, which has only recently begun to find reliable pathways into Western studio systems, loses the rooms where those conversations were happening.
The letter’s concern runs wider than the names at the top of the call sheet. It covers the make-up artists, set designers, food truck operators, florists, and limo drivers whose livelihoods depend on productions actually happening. In the African context, that ripple runs through local crews hired for international co-productions, post-production facilities in Lagos and Cape Town that service foreign shoots, music supervisors who license Afrobeats into film and TV, and the broader ecosystem of talent that benefits when global studios treat Africa as a location and a creative source rather than just an audience.
Then there’s the political layer, which is harder to dismiss.
Paramount Skydance is run by David Ellison. His father Larry Ellison owns it. Larry Ellison is one of Donald Trump’s biggest financial backers, and both Ellisons have made repeated White House visits during Trump’s second term. Trump has called them “friends of mine” who will “do the right thing.” Federal approval of Paramount’s earlier merger with Skydance came shortly after CBS paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit he’d filed over a 60 Minutes interview. These dots aren’t difficult to connect.
The concern circulating through the industry is that a Warner Bros. under Ellison’s umbrella would mean fewer films like the recent Oscar winners Sinners and One Battle After Another, both Warner titles that engage with politics and history in ways the current administration has shown little patience for. Sinners in particular, with its roots in Black American Southern history, is exactly the kind of culturally specific, politically charged story that tends to disappear when studios consolidate and the commercial calculus gets tighter. African filmmakers telling stories that are uncomfortable, political, or simply unfamiliar to a Western mainstream audience face the same pressure, only they’re starting from a weaker negotiating position.
When the people deciding which stories get financed and distributed are close with the president, the worry isn’t theoretical. Eight Democratic senators have already written to David Ellison demanding answers about his communications with the White House during the takeover bid. The DOJ’s antitrust chief has insisted politics won’t influence the review process, which might be more reassuring if the circumstances weren’t so specific.
Jane Fonda called this deal “one of the most destructive threats to free speech and creative expression” the industry has seen. The Writers Guild of America West warned it would be “disastrous” for programming diversity and writer pay. Warner Bros.’ own board initially told shareholders to reject Paramount’s bid, arguing that the targeted $9 billion in cost savings would leave Hollywood worse off.
Paramount’s response to the open letter was that the deal would give creators “more avenues for their work, not fewer.” That may satisfy a shareholder. It’s unlikely to satisfy a writer watching their development deal evaporate, or an African filmmaker who spent three years building a relationship with a Warner executive who no longer has a job.
The shareholder vote is due before the end of April. Regulatory approval comes after. A thousand signatures and a website won’t automatically stop a deal of this size, and everyone involved knows it. But the creative community isn’t going to absorb this one quietly, and neither should the African industry.
African storytelling has spent the last decade fighting for space inside a global content infrastructure that wasn’t designed to include it. The Afrobeats parallel is instructive: the music got in through diaspora networks and persistence, not because the industry opened the door willingly. Film and television are slower and more expensive, which makes the institutional pathways even more important. Every time those pathways narrow, African creators are among the first to lose access. This merger, if it closes the way Hollywood fears it will, is another narrowing. The names on that letter are fighting for their industry. Whether they know it or not, they’re also fighting for ours.
