Paramount Settlement: The States’ Case Closed October 1, the Ninth Circuit Denied a Bid to Stop the Warner Deal, and the Decree’s First Deadline Falls October 27 — Still No Money for Subscribers

Still no money, and still nothing to file. As of October 17, 2026, the Paramount settlement is a court-entered consent decree between 12 states and the company, not a class action: it creates no consumer fund, no refunds and no claim form, and it says that “no person or entity is intended to be a third-party beneficiary of any provision of this Consent Decree for any reason.”

Three things have changed since our October 11 report on the approval and the October 6 closing:

• The states’ case is closed. The State of California v. Paramount Skydance Corp., No. 4:26-cv-07116-AMO, was marked “Civil Case Terminated” on October 1, 2026. The court keeps jurisdiction to enforce the decree.
• The Ninth Circuit denied a bid to stop the deal. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the private plaintiffs’ emergency petition in No. 26-6423 in an order stamped filed October 2, 2026: “The petition is denied.”
• The decree’s clock is running. Its first deadline — an internal Compliance Monitor “within twenty-one (21) days of Closing” — falls on October 27, 2026, by our count from the October 6 closing.

None of this creates a payment for Paramount+, HBO Max or cable subscribers.

The remaining challenge is Faust v. Paramount Skydance Corporation, No. 4:26-cv-03790-AMO, a private antitrust suit that five individuals filed on April 30, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, before the same judge, Araceli Martínez-Olguín. It is not a settlement and pays no one.

On September 21, 2026, the day the states announced their deal, those plaintiffs filed a second motion for a temporary restraining order to stop the closing. Judge Martínez-Olguín denied it on September 30, 2026 (Dkt. 96). She wrote that the plaintiffs “again fail to proffer any evidence” and instead “rely on evidence and legal analysis from a separate case, which alleges different antitrust markets inapplicable in this case.” She pointed to “serious concerns regarding Plaintiffs’ standing” from her earlier order granting a motion to dismiss, and added a warning: “future motions for TRO or preliminary injunction submitted without evidentiary support will face summary denial.”

The plaintiffs then asked the Ninth Circuit for a writ of mandamus. The panel held that they “have not demonstrated a clear and indisputable right to the extraordinary remedy of mandamus,” denied the petition and denied “all other pending motions” as moot. That order is stamped filed October 2, 2026; the district court docket lists it as Dkt. 98 with a filing date of October 1.

What is still pending: Paramount’s motion to dismiss the amended complaint (Dkt. 87, filed August 28, 2026) is set for a hearing on October 21, 2026 at 2:00 p.m. in Oakland, Courtroom 5, after the court advanced it from October 22. On October 16, 2026, a new entry, Dkt. 100, appeared on that docket under the label “Preliminary Injunction.” The document itself was not publicly available when we checked on October 17, so we cannot say whether it is a new motion or a ruling.

The money in the decree goes to programs, funds and the states, not to individuals. The dates below are our arithmetic from the October 6, 2026 closing; the decree states each one in days.

• October 27, 2026 — Compliance Monitor: an internal officer of the combined company, appointed within 21 days of closing, who reports to the Chief Compliance Officer.
• November 5, 2026 — Independent Film Fund: to be formed “within thirty (30) days of Closing,” with $5 million a year for each Commitment Year.
• January 4, 2027 — Monitoring Trustee: chosen jointly by the company and a committee of states “within ninety (90) days of the Closing”; the company pays its reasonable costs.
• March 31, 2027 — first annual certification: the CEO and General Counsel must certify compliance “within ninety (90) days of the end of each calendar year during the Term,” and the certification must be filed on the court docket. That makes it the first public compliance report, by our reading of the decree.
• April 4, 2027 — News Editorial Independence Board for CBS News and CNN, due “within one hundred eighty (180) days following Closing.”

The longer commitments, for the Commitment Years 2027 through 2031: at least 30 theatrical films a year (20 of them wide releases on 2,000 or more screens) in the first two years and 32 a year after that; counted films off Paramount+ or any other subscription streamer for at least 90 days after U.S. release; at least $300 million more a year, and $1.5 billion more in total, on U.S. production than the two companies spent in 2025; and a free, ad-supported Pluto TV service. The AP reported $47.5 million for training displaced workers, $30 million for each missed film and $17.5 million for the Writers Guild health care fund. The states’ legal and expert fees are reimbursed up to $40 million, which the attorneys general may put toward antitrust or consumer protection enforcement.

There is no claim deadline because there is no claim process. The decree has no settlement administrator, no settlement website and no payment schedule for individuals, and only the states can enforce it: it is “enforceable by any Plaintiff State, acting by and through its Attorney General.” Any email, text or post asking you to “register” for a Paramount or Warner Bros. settlement payment, pay a processing fee or enter your Paramount+ or HBO Max login did not come from the court or the states.

The only money that moved to ordinary people was the purchase price for shares: Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders “received an amount in cash equal to $31.01666668 per share,” according to Skydance’s October 6 announcement. That goes through each shareholder’s brokerage account, not through a claim.

If you think the merger hurt you, the decree does not take away your own rights: nothing in it “shall be construed to deprive any person … of any right provided by law … independent of this Consent Decree.” To report a suspected violation of the decree, contact your state attorney general’s office, since only the 12 plaintiff states can enforce it: California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.

Netflix’s payout was a breakup fee, not a settlement. Netflix signed a deal on December 4, 2025 to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming and studio businesses, amended it on January 19, 2026, and lost it on February 27, 2026, when Warner Bros. Discovery terminated that agreement to sign with Paramount. According to Netflix’s quarterly report to the SEC, Paramount Skydance, “on behalf of WBD, paid a $2.8 billion termination fee owed to Netflix.” The AP valued the Paramount deal at $81 billion, or about $111 billion with debt, and reported that Paramount had promised shareholders ticking fees of $7 million for each day the deal was not closed past September 30.

Who is behind it: the combined company, now called Skydance and traded on the New York Stock Exchange as SKYD, is led by chairman and CEO David Ellison; the AP refers to the “billionaire Ellison family.” The closing announcement quotes the founder of RedBird Capital as a Skydance board director saying, “We’re proud to back them.” We have not verified the full financing of the deal and do not list other backers.

That is a separate, earlier settlement, and it has nothing to do with the merger decree or with viewers. In July 2025, the AP reported, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over CBS’s editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a suit filed in Amarillo, Texas. Paramount said the money would go to Trump’s future presidential library, “not to the president himself,” and that the settlement did not involve an apology; “60 Minutes” agreed to release transcripts of future interviews with presidential candidates.

This page does not help with that case: there was never a fund, a class or a claim form for the public. If you are looking for settlements that do pay, our list of open class action settlements covers cases that still accept claims, and our September 30 explainer covers what the states first proposed.

October 21, 2026: the hearing on the motion to dismiss in Faust. If the judge grants it again, the last lawsuit against the merger could end; if not, the case continues, but it is a private lawsuit, not a settlement that pays subscribers.

The states’ docket stays open for enforcement. Even after the case was closed, a document labeled “Letter” was entered as Dkt. 273 on October 15, 2026; we could not read its sender or content. The transcript of the September 24 settlement hearing becomes generally available through PACER after December 30, 2026, and the annual compliance certifications will be filed on the same docket.

We will update this story when the Monitoring Trustee is named or the first certification is filed.