US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, of the Northern District of California, granted a temporary restraining order on 20 July barring Paramount Skydance from closing its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery1. She found the states' evidence on wide-release theatrical market share sufficient to presume an antitrust violation, the standard that shifts the burden onto the merging parties to rebut.
The order answers a complaint filed the week before. Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, led eleven other state attorneys general into court on 13 July seeking to block the deal. Their theory rests on the share of wide-release theatrical films the combined company would control, which is the segment where two of the six remaining major studios become one.
Restraining orders decide nothing about the merits; they hold the position while a court reads the briefs. This one binds at the only point that matters commercially: the parties cannot complete while it is in force, whatever any other regulator has said. Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery had spent nine months collecting clearances on the assumption that antitrust risk was a regulatory question rather than a courtroom one.
Martínez-Olguín also has the $1.5bn Bartz v Anthropic class settlement before her, having ordered supplemental briefing on late opt-outs in May. The two matters are separate and unconnected, and the overlap is a coincidence of docket assignment in a busy district. It does mean one Northern District of California courtroom holds both the largest AI-content settlement this beat has tracked and the largest media merger now in play.
