I have a gut sense that a Paramount Global overseen by Sumner Redstone , instead of his daughter, Shari , would have reached a different conclusion. After all, what is now known as Paramount Global was built on Sumner’s litigation risk-reward calculus.

The legacy companies (Disney, NBCU, Paramount, WBD, Fox) are stuck in a purgatorial period between media systems, trying to wring out the massive but rapidly declining profits of the linear age while transitioning to the sports streaming era. It’s like that puzzle in Die Hard with a Vengeance where Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson must move exactly the... See more

Hollywood looked like a gold mine: the studios and entertainment corporations were ripe with redundancies and inefficiencies to be axed—costs to be cut, parts to be sold, profits to be diverted to shareholders, executives, and new, often unrelated ventures. And thanks to the deregulation of the preceding decades, the industry was wide open.