David Ellison’s heated battle with Netflix for ownership of Warner Bros. Discovery could wind up playing out prominently in Brussels, where regulatory officials are expected to formally open an antitrust probe as part of their approval procedure, once a deal with one of the two contenders is sealed in the U.S.
But even before a Warner Bros. Discovery deal is clinched stateside, so-called “pre-notification discussions” reviewing the rival merger scenarios are already underway within the European Union’s regulatory offices.
So where do Netflix and Paramount stand with Brussels?
Ellison, who is a man on a mission, made his case for Paramount Skydance with members of the EU’s Directorate-General for Competition as part of a recent European lobbying tour-de-force that also took him to France, where he met with French President Emmanuel Macron, and to Germany and the U.K.
Following that European tour, Ellison sent an…