Peter Dekom! Carnivorous Hollywood and the New Rebels: Writers

This week, we invite the esteemed Peter Dekom to provide an in-depth analysis of the intense bidding wars between Netflix and Paramount, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities confronting the entertainment industry today. How do these dynamics influence writers, creators, and the future of storytelling?

Executive Producer Kristin Overn
Creator/Executive Producer Sandy Adomaitis
Producer Terry Sampson
Music by Ethan Stoller

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Transcript

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Hello, my name is Sandy Adamidis, the social media director for the Page International Screenwriting Awards and your host for the Writers Hangout, a podcast that celebrates the many From inspiration to the first draft, revising, getting the project made, and everything in between. We'll talk to the best and the brightest in the entertainment industry, and create a space where you can hang out, learn from the pros, and have fun. The views expressed on this podcast are Peter Ham's opinions based on his legal experience, research And academic work. Hey writers, it's Sandy. I'm coming to you from Studio City, the crown jewel of the San Fernando Valley and home to Balboa Boulevard, the street where Sylvester Stallone had a dingy apartment and was writing the screenplay for Rocky. Hence. Rocky Balboa great name. things would've been different if Sly had an apartment on Pico Writers, boy do we have a great show for you today. My guest is Peter Deck. formerly of Bloom Decker, and her God Has represented remarkable clients including George Lucas, Keenan and Ivy Wayans, John Travolta, Ron Howard, and Robert Town. Peter now has his own podcast, Deum Law and Possibilities, which cuts through the noise with sharp analysis, rye humor, and decades of legal expertise. Peter's returning for the second time on the Writer's Hangout. Peter's here to talk about what everyone in Hollywood is talking about, The bidding war for Warner Brothers. Discovery between Netflix and Paramount. Let's start the show. Okay. Peter Deum, welcome back to The Writer's Hangout. Ah. You know, size matters. So I side, you know, the last time you were on, which was March 9th, 2025, and for all our listeners and writers out there, it is the most talked about episode that I've ever done. Peter Yeah. Before we start, how has 2026 been for you so far? 25 is a horrible year. That will only get worse in 2026. And that means writers need to prepare to be the rebels they were born to be. Now you're here to talk about the Netflix, which announced in December of 2025 that it would acquire Warner Brothers Discoveries, film and streaming assets, including HBO and HBO max for, um, little over$82 billion. Then Paramount Sky eight, it's now up to 108 billion. Oh, wow. Now, paramount Sky Dance, came in and launched a hostile bid urging the, Warner Brothers, discovery shareholders to reject the Netflix deal and says they'll buy everything. Peter, what does this mean for the creatives in Hollywood? We're all gonna make less money. There're gonna be fewer, pieces of content, and there'll be more homogeneous creative decisions made by executives. Not to mention the fact that. Writers, I know the title that that uses the word the new subversive writers, but it's true writers are historically subversive. Let me just do a little historical journey back to China Circus, 600 bc, the time of Confucius. Basically what happened is he lived as a consultant from one chuuk to another, Chuuk, to another Chuuk. They ran China at that time, 600 bc and the general situation was if you said something or you looked them in the eye did something they didn't like, they would cut off your head. So people learn how to talk in mysterious ways. If you wanna say, I disagree with you, that's instant death. So the way you would disagree with someone is you say, instead of saying, well, there's another way of looking at this, you would instead say, there are a thousand flowers in the field. So if someone challenged you, you simply say, I was talking about flowers. And so you get this indirect, plausible deniability that was built into anyone writing, speaking, or otherwise dealing at that time. We are in that era in the United States today, and as much as this merger has got everybody's attention, it's a tadpole in a swimming pool of sharks. It's not what's really happening. You have to look at a much bigger picture, and I hope to do that. last year I got so pissed and I do get pissed every now and again that I actually started my own. I've been doing blogs for, I don't know, since 2008. I've got about six or 7,000 of those on shred.blog spot.com, but I didn't think it was a powerful enough. Method of communicating the panic and disgust that I have with the world around me these days. So I created a new one, and it's available on podcasts at Apple Spotify, whatever, wherever you get your podcasts, Peter. Congratulations on the podcast. I have listened and it's riveting. Well, frogs also make little riveting sounds. But anyway, all I will tell you is it's called Decom, exclamation point Law and Possibilities. Let's talk. This is actually, when you're looking at this, takeover Warner Brothers discovery. It's a symptom of what's going on in a macro basis all over the world, but particularly in the United States. the issue with this is. Both political and economic. Now, clearly, Larry Ellison is one of the top five wealthiest human beings in the United States. He's the principal shareholder in Oracle. His son David Ellison is, has been in the motion picture business, financing some pretty hot movies, including a whole bunch of paramount blockbusters like the uh, Maverick Movie, et cetera. He knows what he's doing. but what you're watching as people are looking at Warner Brothers, which is absolutely, if you at look at last night's awards, Warner Brothers discovery in terms of the motion picture world and the television world is the probably the most successful major studio out there in terms of creative reach and audience satisfaction. So clearly this is a very valuable asset. The Warner Brothers Library also includes, a whole bunch of, Comics, there's a bunch of stuff there and it's amazing. But, and here's the big, but I used to have one, but I'm losing it. the reality here is there is consolidation. And whenever you have major consolidation, that takes a buyer off the marketplace. And when you take a buyer off the marketplace, literally it reduces prices. There's less competition, fewer places to go. And when you start seeing one company cut back. In order to accommodate acquisition costs, which are massive, you'll see other major creative companies using that as an excuse wallet. I'm not gonna pay it. They're not paying it, and the whole price structure collapses, The one thing you can't look forward to anytime soon is sharing an upside that appears to be dead, even though there are various and sundry kinds of lovely. Alternatives, little backend descriptions. The fact of the matter is the linkage one-to-one on what a company is making, and what you will make if you are on a successful production movie or television is completely unrelated. Also, understand that for people who are getting these bonus structures, there are definitional provisions that. Pretty much eliminate the long tail. With a few exceptions, apple has a long tail, where you have an iconic property that continues to perform. There is a provision for, you know, these iconic legacy properties, but for the most part, upside has gone. When they give you the box office bonuses and stuff based on theatrical release, understand the average theatrical release today is not six months or nine months as it may have been in the past. It's 45 days, so whatever else is said and done, the old multiples of formula, that's a box office sharing and all that bull crap is gone. So what you're gonna see is what you get unless you're lucky enough to be in that, verified air of dollar one gross and which isn't really dollar one gross, but that's beyond the pale of this discussion to go into it. Let's talk a little bit about what happened. You have a company, it's called Netflix. It is huge. And I have to say the guy who runs it, Ted Surround, he's one of two CEOs, but Ted. As much as you would love me to trash Ted, I can't. Ted is actually a good guy. I like him. I know him pretty well. We serve on a board together. I watched him deal with creative people. He actually likes and respects creative people. He actually is a very. creative sensitive human being, even though Bella Bahar is now the head of creative at Netflix. I will just tell you that Ted's not a bad guy. The bad news is when you get a company of this size, which is bigger than all the other. Um, streamers combined except YouTube, which is in a different world'cause it tends to be short form content and other people's channels. What you're basically getting is a single unitary perspective of what to be picked up and whether you like it or not. Netflix is governed by algorithms, analytical algorithms. Look at themes, track records. The Q scores as we used to call'em, of various participants in a production or movie, actors, directors, writers. what the genre is and what the marketplace looks like. And that algorithm will analyze a screenplay that's submitted and the creative elements that are attached, and it will spit out a recommendation to the creative participants, creative deciders in the company. And that algorithm will become one of the major, parts of the decision to green light something or to develop it. Development deals are going to be increasingly rare. Because everybody understands with fewer buyers, they need to be seduced more, and you need to have more elements to put the stuff together. So I think I said this last time, but I'll say it again, to get a production in today's world, unless you are already an established superstar. It takes a village, it takes a whole lot of people who love the property and are willing to go to bat for it. People who have credibility within the industry, if you try to go and say, my agent submits this, and it goes in, you're dead in the water unless you're Steven Spielberg or you're, some other superstar in that world, you really have to understand this is a seduction. And you may want to create, you know, visual materials, maybe even play with ai. Did I say ai? Well, guess what, folks, no matter what the Writer's Guild or any of the other unions are doing, they're not gonna stop it, So we're gonna have to learn to deal with it one way or another. And the, I know that the collective bargaining agreements begin negotiations in February. This time it is not the Director's Guild that starts off, it's the Writer's Guild. And, and that's on purpose'cause it's, director's Guild was the last to go in the last round, and they believe they were screwed because every other union. Used what the directors deal did and upped it. So the DGA said, eh, we're not gonna do that no more. They don't, they speak with a weird accent. I dunno why they do that, but they do. In any event where I don't think there's gonna be a strike, I don't think the increase in compensation's gonna be more than 3%. I think there's gonna be a focus on pension and health, benefits. I think that's healthcare in particular because as you know, Congress appears at this point looking either to repeal it or substitute it with something that is absolutely inferior, just as costs are skyrocketing. but let's get back to this acquisition, number one is an antitrust problem and the issue here. If you're in Europe and this company, mergers of this size and nature will have to go through scrutiny before the European Union. But there is an antitrust commission that looks at these things, and it's not gonna be particularly favorable to this type of merger or acquisition, whatever you want to call it. There's always bits of merging and acquiring and all these things, but you have a. Battle here between two BMOs. Netflix made an offer to acquire not all the assets, but the HBO and theatrical and the production arm of Warner Brothers leaving the linear television and. CNN. We'll talk about CNN in a moment'cause that is actually one of the battlegrounds. and leaving those companies to be either spun off separately or bought by. another company is either was gonna be a standalone or otherwise Paramount Skydance proposal is to buy everything that includes CNN and all those linear networks, the Turner broadcasting, all that stuff. discovery networks, all that crap. Obviously Netflix doesn't want that. But here's the problem. Netflix faces, if this company, Warner Brothers Discovery is acquired by somebody else and they happen to have a streaming capacity. but what you're doing here is taking product. Out of the output that Netflix currently enjoys some of Netflix's most successful content comes from Warner Brothers. things like suits and, Young Sheldon are among the most popular shows. They outperform the movies, they outperform everything else on Netflix. And if other companies happen to have streaming operations, Disney, Comcast, peacock and you start looking at these and you think, well, if they're not, if they're streamers. They wind up buying Warner Brothers, then Netflix isn't gonna be able to buy that content anymore. So Netflix felt threatened immediately, and they said, you know what? I don't want a streaming company like Peacock, or, someone like Pluto that are owned by other companies. I don't want them in the mix. I'm gonna preempt it. I'm gonna buy it and I'm gonna pay a lot of money for it. Now let's look at the politics of this thing. Larry Ellison is, very conservative and very much affiliated with the Trump people. father to David Ellison, and he is a father to David Ellison who would be running Skydance Paramount, which would acquire this thing. And so as a result, there was apparently a meeting. The new year brings new writing goals, and like many of you out there, I am committed to finishing my novel that I've been working on for years. We all know that the details you jot down when you start can quickly become fuzzy when days, weeks, and even months. Pass between writing sessions. I wish I had Noum our sponsor, which is a fantastic writing tool that quickly turns chaos into clear well organized stories when I started writing. Whether you write directly on Noum Or upload an existing draft, your characters and setting details. Timeline events and plot pacing are automatically pulled from your story to view at a glance and in real time. 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Someone named Donald John something and apparently Donald John something said, I want CNN sold, but I don't want it sold to an unfriendly party. And I am told, I can't tell you that I know this from direct knowledge, but I believe it's true that they made an agreement that CNN would operate as a very. As a much more conservative network and that a number of people within CNN who are are bent as liberal would be disposed of. How do we know what this means? Well, let's look what happens when Skydance Paramount, basically own CBS. You may have noticed that they're laying off all kinds of people. The excuse you just fired some very, very senior producers. and here's what it says when they fire someone, we find that these producers, these on-air personalities are no longer aligned with our vision, which means they're not presenting a conservative perspective. You'll notice that certain. New, Telecaster on CBS evening news, and I'm not sure how to pronounce it, it's decap pill or whatever. It's yo pill. Tony is a, you know, not a particularly well known guy, but he is liked very much by the Trump administration. You'll also notice that 60 Minutes had a little editorial moment when they decided not to air the piece on Sea Cot that prison in El Salvador, right where they got exclusive footage. Because in Barry Weiss, the new head of news for the entire Skydance, paramount Group. Decided that it wasn't, didn't present the administration side, and it didn't have any actual interviews of people from the Trump administration, even though they asked the Trump administration if they had anything to add, which, and the Trump administration said, no, we don't. When it started to come up, guess what happened? That show got shut down and a lot of people were unhappy, so. You now have dunk capel taking over the desk at CVS evening news, and he's a nice guy, but in my mind's eye, he's vanilla without the bean, but more likely, a little bit more like a right wing vanilla without the bean. so now we have this paramount BMOs with one of the richest people in the world. Larry Ellison, apparently ready to put his. Giant checkbook into the mix. And Netflix has an agreement with, Warner Brothers that says you can't entertain any other offers. If someone comes out and offers you something, your shareholders can look at it. We can't stop, stop that by law, but we're not gonna let you have conversations with them to negotiate what you want. Oh, well that's really nice. what they're doing is the board of directors, at Warner Brothers Discovery looked at the Paramount offer and said, look, we have to figure out the difference. When you carve out the CNN piece, how much all that's worth, one group says it's worth 15 billion and there are other costs. So the$30 a share that was offered is now reduced by some arbitrary amount by the board. And basically they turned around and said, we do not back. Do we tell the shareholders we recommend? So they, we can't, we're not dealing with, paramount directly. We're telling our shareholders that the hostile, tender offer, which has to be responded to by January 21st. Is not good and is not comparable. There's also a lot of borrowing going on so that if in fact Paramount Skydance takes Warner Brothers discovery, there's always a chance that the resulting company may wind up being insolvent.'cause it's really taking up, like$87 billion worth of debt and it gets worse than that. Because they're even saying we're not even sure Larry Ellison, since you're doing a lot of twisting and storming using bank financing, that these banks won't find an excuse to pull out their financing. So unless you're ready to step and out and write the check directly, if for some reason these banks don't, decide to clinging on. Oops. Star Trek illusion. Cling on who you. you're gonna have to write a check. Larry Ellison said I might do that. So we have a big fight for this asset, but if you were watching the Golden Globes or one of the few people doing that, he glass your had some cool lines, he said, and the award for editing goes to. 60 minutes and there's a new news service out there created by this company. It's called CBS. So you are watching an industry that is not happy with what's going on, and Trump is in the middle of this. if your name is Jimmy Kimmel, or perhaps you are, the CBS situation, whatever it is you see. A guy named Brenton Cart who is basically saying, you know what? I'm head of the FCC and I'm going to get, go after all those broadcast licenses that are at the bulwark of what you do. Well, you know what? You can't do that. But it doesn't stop them from threatening. It doesn't stop them. The saying, we're gonna do it whether we can do it or not. And that's not what we want to hear, So what we have is this little teeny thing called CNN that Donald Trump wants to make sure is going to be sold to the right player. there's so many approvals that the government has to give SEC for transfers of SOC and mergers and acquisitions, federal Communications Commission for transfers of broadcast licenses, the Department of Justice, federal Trade Commission in connection with, antitrust issues. So the government's all over this and they don't want Netflix to get it. And everyone is scared of Netflix anyway'cause it's so damn big that if it acquires this. Huge asset, you know, HBO and PBS and Warner Brothers and Discovery and all that stuff that it is going to be completely creatively monolithic, and so we don't like that. On the other hand, looking at Paramount Skydance buying the same asset, it's going to be profoundly political. So We're not gonna make remotely the kind of money we were used to making. It was bad enough when they pulled back because of the fin in rule. But this little thing came out. you have people spending lots and lots of money acquiring sports. And when that money goes into sports, like NBA made an 11, uh, year$77 billion rights deal with Disney ES ESPN. Comcast, NBC and Peacock and Amazon pri, all these people are buying sports that is the same budget they used to buy or create original movies, original series. Two years ago. 50% of what, Netflix aired on their original programming. They financed. But then today it's 30% and sliding. So you're what? Looking at the fact that Comcast and Disney have announced that they're gonna pull way back on entertainment spending. So what do you do? You're a writer here, number one. When I called you subversive, I think it, you really need to take that to heart.'cause the only way you're gonna get stuff done in this world is to be subversive. You need to find new ways to express yourself. And it may not be looking for a gig or selling a script. It may be doing something on YouTube, building a creative following. Be inventive, be subversive, be creative. There is always a path, and I will tell you throughout history, whether you're social needs or you're someone writing during the chew period. Writers have always been sacrificed. Writers have always been the first thing that people kill every dictator, whether it's Hitler or you've got, the lovely people, Orban or. GaN or you go down the list. When they take power, one of the first things they curtail is media and you are writers and you write for media. So you're in the crosshairs of a major conservative political swing. Even if you're conservative and you write conservative stuff, you elicit backlash and you disrupt the calm seas of dictatorial takeover. You have to find a way. you need to do this. you also should hang in. Listen to my podcast again. Decom Law and Possibilities. Thank you so much for being on The Writer's Hangout I'll talk to you, Anan. Hopefully you join me on my podcast. we're starting off audio only, but every single one one of my episodes is on video Law and Possibilities. Writers. I'm really glad we get to do this and every week you show up because if you didn't, I'd just be talking to my cat, Sophie, Joe. and that's a wrap for the Writer's Hangout. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your positive feedback will help us keep the show going so we can continue bringing you more future episodes. Remember, keep writing. The world needs your stories. The Writers Hangout is sponsored by the Page International Screenwriting Awards, with executive producer Kristen Overn, Sandy Adamides, and myself, Terry Sampson. And our music is composed by Ethan Stoller. Alexa, you are gaslighting me,