Paramount Skydance's $110bn acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), cleared by the US Department of Justice on 12 June, now waits at three separate gates on two continents. The European Commission pushed its merger-control deadline from 7 July to Wednesday 22 July after Paramount submitted remedies, one reportedly the dissolution of its film-distribution joint venture (JV) with Universal Pictures, which European cinema operators have criticised as anti-competitive1.
The antitrust review runs alongside a second European clock. A separate Commission probe under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR), examining the roughly 38.5% Gulf sovereign-wealth financing behind the deal, Saudi Arabia's PIF at 15.1%, the UAE at 12.8%, Qatar's QIA at 10.6%, is due on 14 July2. Both land before Article 50 of the AI Act, the synthetic-content transparency duty, binds on 2 August.
Washington supplies the third gate. Senate Democrats Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff wrote to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on 18 June demanding a formal "may not close" notice by 1 July, citing that same Gulf financing against the deal's 49.5% foreign-ownership ceiling3. No public FCC response has surfaced. Paramount, which bought The Free Press for $150m in May to remake CBS News, can settle the journalism; it cannot control the order in which three regulators clear it.
Each slipped deadline eats into the 30 September ticking-fee window the deal must close before. The Foreign Subsidies probe will also set the template for how the next Gulf sovereign-wealth stake in a media asset is tested4.
