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-competitive 1.
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 July 2. 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 ceiling 3. 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 tested 4.
