Fox calls DOJ scrutiny “entirely expected” as its $22B bet on owning Roku’s gateway holds

The most consequential media deal of the year is not about a single show or a studio slate — it is about who controls the first screen a viewer sees when the television switches on. Fox Corp’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku is a wager on owning that gateway, and this week the company made clear it has no intention of letting a regulatory speed bump slow it down.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in San Francisco, Fox president and chief operating officer John Nallen said the deal is on track to close and dismissed the U.S. Department of Justice’s new demand for information as “entirely expected.” As Deadline first reported, Fox and Roku each received a so-called second request from the DOJ — a routine antitrust instrument that lengthens the review clock rather than a verdict that regulators mean to block the merger.

The rationale behind the purchase is vertical integration on a scale Hollywood rarely attempts. Fox brings a deep bench of news, sports and entertainment along with Tubi, its free ad-supported streamer; Roku supplies the operating system baked into tens of millions of connected televisions, plus the advertising pipes and first-party data that run through it. Combined, they hand one company both the content and the digital shelf where audiences find it.

For the movie business, that pairing rewires distribution economics. Whoever owns the connected-TV gateway shapes how rival streaming services — and the films inside them — get surfaced to more than 100 million homes. It is the same fear that has shadowed every marriage of platform and content since the studios once owned the theaters that showed their pictures, and it is why chief executive Lachlan Murdoch has taken pains to say Fox expects Roku to keep running as a separate business.

The deal now moves on a regulatory calendar. The second request extends the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act for 30 days after Fox and Roku substantially comply, and both sides still expect to close in the first half of 2027. Wall Street read the wait unevenly, with Fox shares trailing Roku’s in the session that followed.

Nallen’s message was carefully calibrated: a second request is the toll, not the roadblock, on the road to owning the box that sits between the audience and everything it watches.

Tags: streaming-strategy, acquisition, Fox Corp, John Nallen, Roku, Tubi