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
Check out our fantastic sponsor, Novelium:
1 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.
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So with Code Hangout, that's.
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So with code Hangout.
The rumors have it that there was a meeting between Larry,
maybe David.
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
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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,