Ari Emanuel is throwing his weight behind Paramount‘s pending $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, blasting the lawsuit against it as “trash” in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

From the headline arguing the merger “could save Hollywood” to its coda urging government regulators to let creatives “get back to trying to rip each other’s heads off,” the piece is a strong endorsement at a key moment. Once widely considered a cinch to close over the summer, the deal has been put into limbo by the suit by 12 state attorneys general. After clear signs that a judge was skeptical of its defense, Paramount decided to agree to go to trial and not to close the deal before June 1, 2027, or a favorable ruling, whichever comes first.

Emanuel, CEO of TKO Group Holdings and longtime former super-agent who build Endeavor into a major force in Hollywood, is not without conflict in the legal battle. TKO’s UFC last year became one of the first beneficiaries of Paramount’s new ownership when the David Ellison-run company paid $7.7 billion for rights to the mixed-martial arts circuit.

The tagline used to identify Emanuel to Journal readers says only that he is “executive chair and CEO of TKO, which does business with movie studios.” It also declines to note that he is executive chair of WME Group, corporate parent of major agency WME.

The attorneys general “say they are protecting competition. Their actions threaten to destroy it,” Emanuel warns.

“You know an antitrust case is trash when it ignores some of the fastest-growing competitors in the market,” he writes. The plaintiffs “pretend Amazon MGM, A24 and Lionsgate don’t exist and that Netflix isn’t leaning into theatrical films with its coming release of Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew (which I suspect will whet its appetite for more).”

In the theatrical movie arena, the claims in the complaint about concentration do not “remotely reflect reality,” Emanuel insists.

Addressing one of area of controversy, Emanuel says studio theatrical releases compete with YouTube, video games and an array of other screen content. (The lawsuit says the market should be defined as direct competitors in movie releasing, noting that it would effectively collapse two major studios into one.)

“You think I’m letting my client’s horror movie premiere on the same day as a MrBeast video? Or the release of the latest Call of Duty? Or when Netflix drops Wednesday? Think again,” the exec writes. “The attorneys general don’t get to ignore the platforms that compete every day for audiences, talent, capital and content just because it makes their case harder. Believe me, as somebody who’s in those rooms, every green light, marketing budget and release date is decided against the reality of that broadly competitive environment.”

The complaint’s monopoly assertion about cable network concentration, an issue that has surprisingly come to the fore in the case a decade after pay-TV’s peak, involves the same “sleight of hand,” Emanuel contends. “This might have been a good argument in 2005 but is absurd in a world of fast-shrinking cable subscriptions and the rise of streaming, which has transformed both consumer behavior and the bargaining environment,” he writes.

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