Theater Owners Split Over Paramount's $111 Billion Warner Bros. Takeover
The two biggest cinema chains in the United States are backing Paramount's proposed $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery — openly contradicting their own industry lobby, which has spent months fighting the deal.
AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron and Regal Cinemas CEO Eduardo Acuna both support the merger, according to Variety. Their stance puts them directly at odds with Cinema United, the exhibition industry's main lobbying group, whose president and CEO Michael O'Leary has called the transaction "harmful to exhibition, consumers and the entire entertainment ecosystem" (Reuters).
Aron has been pushing the deal since CinemaCon in April. He published a Variety op-ed defending the merger against an antitrust lawsuit filed by a collection of state attorneys general, arguing that the complaint "simply gets the economics of our business backwards." On the same day that op-ed ran, O'Leary issued his own letter endorsing the litigation to delay the merger, writing that "the promises of support for theatrical being made in the media are high-level and unenforceable" (Variety).
Acuna, for his part, warned that blocking or delaying the deal might create "more uncertainty and distraction that could be damaging to our industry" (Variety).
The split runs along a familiar fault line: size. AMC and Regal are Cinema United's two most powerful members. The group's smaller exhibitors worry that the internal fracture could jeopardise their future bargaining power with studios — the leverage that independent theatre owners depend on when negotiating terms for the films they show (Variety).
O'Leary, appointed in 2023 to succeed the long-time advocacy firebrand John Fithian, has kept up a steady public campaign against the deal. His core concern: a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. would mean fewer films reaching cinemas, and potential theatre closures as a result (Variety). The state attorneys general's antitrust lawsuit makes a parallel argument — that reducing the number of companies making wide-release films would squeeze local theatres and harm the theatrical market (The Hollywood Reporter; Reuters).
The deal has already survived several rounds of scrutiny. Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve the Paramount Skydance takeover despite widespread opposition (Reuters). David Ellison, the newly minted studio CEO of Paramount Skydance, personally pitched the acquisition to theatre owners at a meeting on 16 April 2026 (Reuters). His bid, backed by Arab wealth funds, came after rival Netflix had entered exclusive talks to acquire Warner Bros. in December 2025 — a prospect that had some theatre owners openly rooting against it as an "unprecedented threat" (Variety).
Sean Gamble, CEO of Cinemark — the No. 3 U.S. theatre chain — had not officially endorsed the merger as of the Variety report (Variety).
All of this is unfolding against the healthiest box office since before the pandemic. Hollywood was enjoying its biggest summer season since COVID, with yearly domestic revenues — covering the United States and Canada — poised to hit $10 billion for the first time since 2019 (Variety).
The irony is not lost on anyone in the room. The business is recovering, and the people running it cannot agree on whether one of the largest media mergers in history will help or hurt the screens that show the movies.
