Adam Aron tells blocking AGs ‘thanks, but no thanks’ as AMC bets big on a merged Paramount

For most of the last decade, movie-theater operators treated studio consolidation as a threat to be survived, not a lifeline to be welcomed — fewer buyers meant weaker terms and thinner slates. Adam Aron, who runs the largest exhibition chain on earth, is now betting the opposite. His public embrace of a merged Paramount and Warner Bros. reframes the deal not as a squeeze on cinemas but as the surest engine of the theatrical comeback he has spent years promising.

As Variety first reported, Aron waved off the state attorneys general trying to freeze the merger with a blunt “thanks, but no thanks,” arguing that regulators picturing a shrunken marketplace fundamentally misread how the movie business actually works. A larger, better-capitalized Paramount, in his telling, is a studio that fills screens rather than starves them — the difference between a distributor hedging its bets and one committed to the big room.

The endorsement matters because it splits the exhibition camp. Cinema United, the trade body that speaks for theater owners collectively, has blasted the same deal and backed the litigation designed to slow it, warning that a combined studio would gain dangerous leverage over the companies that actually sell tickets. Aron’s break with that line hands David Ellison — whose Paramount is the acquirer — a rare ally among the very operators a consolidated studio would one day negotiate against.

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It also aligns Aron with an unlikely chorus. Days earlier, superagent Ari Emanuel used a Wall Street Journal op-ed to dismiss the states’ antitrust suit as “trash,” selling the merger as Hollywood’s cure rather than its disease. Between the most powerful agent in the business and its most visible theater executive, the pro-merger case has quietly acquired the two constituencies — talent and exhibition — that antitrust hawks assumed would resist it.

The stakes are concrete. Twelve Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in mid-July to block the roughly $111 billion tie-up, and Paramount has since agreed not to close the transaction until five days after a trial or June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. Aron’s intervention lands squarely inside that window — a lobbying beat aimed less at the courtroom than at the public argument for letting the deal through.

It is a strange spectacle: the man who runs the theaters cheering on the studio that will one day dictate his terms — a wager that a bigger Hollywood is worth more to the box office than a freer one.

Tags: Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, David Ellison, Adam Aron, AMC Theatres, media-merger

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