CEO David Ellison threatens to move Paramount out of California by Oct. 1

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison has told his top executives he is prepared to move the studio out of California starting Oct. 1 unless California Attorney General Rob Bonta agrees to negotiate a settlement in the state’s antitrust lawsuit against Paramount’s $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Mr. Ellison delivered the ultimatum at an hourlong lunch meeting on the Paramount lot last Wednesday with his 12-member executive leadership team, according to TheWrap, which reported he insisted his preference was to keep the company’s roughly 30,000 jobs in Southern California. The industry newsletter Puck was first to report that Paramount’s board has already signed off on the relocation plan if talks with Mr. Bonta’s office don’t materialize.

Tennessee, Texas and Georgia are under consideration as a new home for the studio, and Mr. Ellison has family ties to Tennessee: his father, Larry Ellison, is relocating Oracle’s headquarters to Nashville. The industry outlet Semafor first reported that Mr. Ellison had raised the possibility of relocating; Puck subsequently broke the more detailed plan, which would begin with Paramount’s headquarters and unfold over a five-year period, eventually shifting most studio jobs out of state while retaining a creative hub in Los Angeles, Axios reported.

Oct. 1 carries financial weight for Paramount beyond the politics. That’s the date a contractual “ticking fee” of $7 million per day, owed to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders, begins accruing if the merger hasn’t closed.

Mr. Bonta, who is leading a coalition of states suing to block the merger on antitrust grounds, dismissed the relocation threat as coercion. “Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court,” his office said in a statement.

The trial in the state’s lawsuit is scheduled for March 2, 2027, in federal court in the Northern District of California. Mr. Ellison has separately argued in a New York Times op-ed that he believes opposition to the merger centers less on antitrust concerns than on “whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN.”