Paramount Is Reportedly Putting Into Writing Its Commitment to Movie Theaters — Will It Make a Difference?

David Ellison has repeatedly promised 30 movies per year for three years with a 45-day theatrical window before PVOD.

The crux of the current state attorneys generals’ argument against the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger is that the deal will be bad for movie theaters because a combined Paramount-WBD will be able to dictate terms to exhibitors that will only further hamstrung them. As such, the states believe they’re on the side of the movie theaters.

So why then are the CEOs of the No. 1 and No. 2 theater chains in America taking Paramount’s side?

Last week, AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron wrote an op-ed for Variety publicly endorsing the Paramount-WBD merger, writing that the states’ legal challenge must be overcome as soon as possible. “Thanks, but no thanks,” Aron wrote in response to the AG’s help. “Their complaint simply gets the economics of our business backwards.”

Shortly thereafter, Regal Cinemas CEO Eduardo Acuna gave a statement to Deadline saying “it’s time” for the merger to go through and called Paramount and Ellison an “effective steward” of the two legacy studios.

“A long fight in court that extends into spring or summer doesn’t put more films in theaters, and is not beneficial to studios, filmmakers, the guests who go to the movies, or theater businesses like Regal and the people who work for them,” Acuna said. “It just creates more uncertainty and distraction that could be damaging to our industry as we build on our current success. It is time for all parties to sit down and work out how to formalize these commitments.”

Now we have an idea as to why AMC and Regal brass are backing the deal.

Bloomberg reported Monday that Paramount is agreeing to put into writing its commitment to theatrical releases under the merger, and that AMC and Regal are among the chains that are agreeing to a combined Paramount-WBD’s terms.

It’s unclear if the third-largest chain, Cinemark, was also approached. Reps for Paramount, AMC, and Regal did not respond to IndieWire’s request for comment on the report. Previously, Acuna said in his statement to Deadline that Ellison “is sincere in making these commitments, and he has offered to execute a consent decree to the State AGs to that effect.”

The agreement is the same as what Ellison has said publicly time and time again, including at CinemaCon in front of these very theater owners: the combined studio will release 30 movies per year, each wide release film will have a minimum of a 45-day theatrical window until PVOD and a 90-day minimum window until SVOD, and it will commit to this for three years.

It’s unclear however what penalties Paramount would face if it were to break this commitment, and many have expressed doubts that such agreements are actually enforceable.

The timing is peculiar but perhaps not a coincidence. A judge last week set a trial date for March to determine the validity of the merger, a blow to Paramount as it lobbied for a date as soon as November and looks to avoid paying a costly ticking fee of $7 million per day starting October 1, totaling upwards of $1 billion by next spring. An appeals process could stretch this out even longer. Paramount has agreed not to close until June unless a trial concludes before then. And they’d like to do anything they can to move this thing along, sway public opinion, reach a settlement, and move forward.

Cinema United, the trade organization that represents theater owners, including AMC and Regal, however still remains publicly opposed to the merger. The organization’s CEO Michael O’Leary sent a memo to its members last week after Variety published its Aron op-ed. In it, O’Leary wrote that the group met with Paramount leadership in June but hadn’t heard back from Paramount as of July 1, even though it sure sounds like from both Aron and Acuna’s statements that they had and gotten assurances they were looking for.

An individual familiar with the group’s thinking said Cinema United is still open to discussions with all parties and its position hasn’t changed: it wants meaningful guardrails to protect the theatrical industry in the future. A Paramount spokesperson previously in response to O’Leary’s memo disputed Cinema United’s timeline and said the trade group’s counsel “introduced new demands unrelated to the merger.”

All these promises matter little to California AG Rob Bonta. He wrote his own op-ed in Deadline on Monday, August 10, not long after Ellison voiced his perspective in the New York Times in a true battle in the press. Bonta said that no matter how Ellison and company try to spin things (Ellison suggested in his op-ed this whole drama is about CNN and fears over his politics), the states’ lawsuit has to do with antitrust law and will have an impact “that can’t be remedied with a few one-off, piecemeal promises.”

So yes, make all the deals you want with movie theaters or say whatever you want regarding CNN. Bonta is saying none of that matters in the grand scheme of this lawsuit or will make it go away any sooner, nor does it eliminate the states’ concern over cable network consolidation. Does it matter to the public or to the rest of Hollywood? The jury’s still out there too.

The commitment that Ellison has repeatedly made of a 45-day theatrical window is not the biggest concern, even to exhibitors. It’s increasingly getting back to being an industry standard at least for wide-release, major studio tentpoles, even if some of the smaller specialized titles are going to streaming sooner. He’s also promised a minimum 90-day window to SVOD and, if you pressed some theater owners, some of them would say that’s not long enough and that other studios stretch their SVOD window even longer.

The bigger concern is the 30 movies a year. Paramount has pointed out again and again that it has 15 movies in theaters in 2026, as does Warner Bros., and as recently as last year Paramount only had 9 releases. The states have pointed to the steep decline in titles from 20th Century Studios and Searchlight Pictures compared to before 20th Century Fox was absorbed by Disney as precedent for what will happen with Paramount and Warner Bros., and Paramount has done all it can to dispel that notion.

Part of the reason people still don’t believe it is a three-year span for 30 theatrical releases a year can safely cover a ton of movies that WB and Paramount already have in development or in the pipeline. It says nothing of what they’ll do or how many movies they’ll release after those titles have run out.

To the theaters, more movies is always better for as long as they can get their hands on them. You can sympathize with Aron that exhibitors suffered an existential crisis when COVID hit, it slowed any recovery that had been made when the strikes happened, and now you want to hamstrung theaters again with another delay that could impact the output of two studios?

And for the general public, they want options but really only care if the movies are good. Will such an aggressive output harm the quality? No consent decree or court case can promise that.