Mark Ruffalo vows to keep fighting as Paramount’s $111bn Warner Bros merger clears its last hurdle

Hollywood stars rarely campaign against the companies that put their work on screen. Mark Ruffalo, the Hulk of Marvel’s films and a regular on HBO, one of the brands about to change hands, spent the summer as the most visible face of the opposition to Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the melding of two of Hollywood’s historic companies. Now that the deal has cleared its last legal hurdle, he is not conceding defeat; he says the fight has simply changed shape.

As Deadline reported, Ruffalo reacted within hours of U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín signing off on the antitrust settlement between David Ellison’s Paramount and a dozen state attorneys general. “This merger will stifle creativity, weaken free speech and cost people their jobs — it is a bad deal for this country and should never have been approved,” the two-time Emmy winner wrote. He called the result “an incredibly disappointing outcome for the hundreds of thousands of us who stood up to block it,” before adding: “it’s also not the end.”

His case has always been about concentration rather than any single film or series. In August he warned that the deal would give “one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros.”, and he later urged California Attorney General Rob Bonta publicly not to cave as settlement talks advanced. In his latest post he insisted that the “grassroots movement isn’t going to fade away and neither is our resolve,” casting the merger as one front in a wider fight against billionaire consolidation of the media.

Critics of the settlement say it extracted little. According to Deadline, the agreement secured few concessions beyond those the Ellisons had been offering even before the states sued, and the calendar worked in Paramount’s favour: while awaiting trial, the company faced a ticking fee of $7 million a day owed to WBD shareholders if the deal stalled.

Jobs are where Ruffalo’s warning meets the numbers. A report from the Los Angeles County Department of Economic Opportunity, filed on June 18, estimated that about 2,495 jobs in Greater Los Angeles and roughly 6,000 worldwide could be at risk, mostly in corporate, tech, real estate and other shared functions duplicated across the two companies. Paramount insists it is planning for job creation, not job losses.

The combined company, which still has no name, has appointed former Mattel chief Ynon Kreiz as co-CEO and is expected to close fully by October 8. It will open its doors carrying more than $80 billion in debt, a figure that Deadline reads as a near-guarantee of cost-cutting. The settlement also removes the antitrust trial that had been scheduled for March 2.

The irony is built into Ruffalo’s position: HBO, the network where he keeps working, is one of the three brands his campaign tried to keep out of a single family’s hands, and from next week it will answer to that family.

Tags: HBO, Paramount, David Ellison, Mark Ruffalo, Warner Bros. Discovery, studio-deal