Paramount Can't Sell Itself and He-Man Can't Break Even

A federal judge in California hit pause on the $110 billion Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger on Monday, which means the two most panicked media companies in America are now legally forbidden from crawling into the same hospital bed to die together. Twelve state attorneys general sued to block it. Read that number again. Twelve. There are states out there with real electoral votes where the top law-enforcement priority this month is making sure Skydance doesn't get to own both the studio that makes Frasier reruns and the one that makes Aquaman movies. California's AG Rob Bonta is leading it, and his complaint, all thirty-eight pages of it per Deadline, says the deal would "extinguish competition." Extinguish the competition to do what, exactly. To lose money on He-Man? Because I've read this week's slate. The competition these companies are fighting to protect is the God-given American right to greenlight a Big Bang Theory spinoff about the guy who owned the comic book store. There's a hearing August 3rd. I would bet money not everyone finds the courtroom.

Here's the part that finishes me. The same week Paramount is legally barred from selling itself, Paramount+ drops a new season of Strange New Worlds — a show entirely about boldly going somewhere. The parent company can't go anywhere. It's zip-tied to a chair in a federal courthouse in California. The metaphor wrote itself and then filed for an extension.

The Drops

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4 (Paramount+). Anson Mount is back as Captain Pike, owner of the most self-assured hair in Starfleet, and the season runs ten episodes weekly into late September. Paramount already confirmed season five will be the last, built to bridge into the 1966 original — so the one genuinely good thing this company still makes has a countdown clock ticking on it while the executives upstairs wrestle over who gets to own the smoking crater. It remains the rare new Trek where each episode is its own strange little object instead of eight hours of people frowning at a viewscreen. Watch it. It's the best asset in the entire merger and nobody arguing about the merger seems to have noticed.

Masters of the Universe (Prime Video). They spent two hundred million dollars on a live-action He-Man movie. Put it in theaters in June. Watched it make a hundred and thirteen million worldwide, a full eighty-seven million short of its own budget, and now, seven weeks later, still visibly bleeding, it staggers onto Prime Video so you can not watch it at home for free. Nicholas Galitzine is Prince Adam. Jared Leto is Skeletor, a role I have to assume required no prosthetics. Travis Knight directed it, and Travis has made actually beautiful films, which means somewhere inside this is a real filmmaker being fed feet-first into the toy-licensing machine. Two hundred million. For He-Man. In this economy.

72 Hours (Netflix). Kevin Hart plays a forty-year-old executive who gets accidentally added to a group text for a bachelor party and instead of typing the four words a normal person would type, "wrong number, sorry, congrats," flies to Miami to spend three days partying with a pack of twentysomethings he has never met. That's the film. Tim Story directed, the Cobra Kai guys wrote it, and it is precisely as much movie as that logline promises. If you have ever wanted to watch Kevin Hart make the scared face at a nightclub one more time, your Friday is booked.

The Dink (Apple TV+). Jake Johnson plays a washed-up former tennis prodigy who blows out his wrist and reinvents himself in the one sport engineered specifically to make that injury worse. Pickleball. Ed Harris plays his dad. Ben Stiller's in it. Andy Roddick turns up as the rival, playing himself, because that's just where Andy Roddick is now. The Hollywood Reporter called it "anodyne," which is critic for "my heart rate did not move a single beat." Apple keeps building these — the handsome, pleasant movie that evaporates from your memory before the credits stop rolling. It's fine. Everything Apple makes is fine. Fine is the whole brand.

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe (HBO Max). A sentence I did not expect to write in 2026: there is now a Big Bang Theory spinoff about the guy who ran the comic book store, and the plot is that he accidentally destroys the multiverse. Kevin Sussman is back as Stuart. He breaks a device Sheldon and Leonard built and triggers a reality-ending Armageddon — genuinely more stakes than that character got across twelve years of standing behind a register looking quietly defeated. Chuck Lorre is still pulling oil out of this franchise. Ten episodes. I won't be watching, but I respect a man who found crude under his own house and just keeps drilling.

Elite Force (Netflix). French action thriller about the GIGN, France's elite tactical unit, from the team behind Ganglands. Tomer Sisley plays a unit chief who wants out, right up until an attack drags him back in, and yes, that's the plot of most of these, but the French shoot it lean and mean while American cop TV is on its twenty-seventh season of finding a body in a dumpster. Eight episodes. Netflix will bury it under a thumbnail that makes it look like everything else on there.

The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3 (AMC+). Negan and Maggie are back in zombie Manhattan for eight more episodes of the most functional dysfunctional marriage on television. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is having more fun than anyone in this franchise has had since roughly 2015, and it's contagious. Still worth it, same as when I said so last time. The one franchise that will not die made a show about the things that will not die, and it turned out to be the best one they've got.

Also crawling onto a streamer this week: Guy Ritchie's 2019 The Gentlemen — the movie, McConaughey and Hugh Grant, not the Netflix series — lands on HBO Max July 25th, for anyone who wants to watch Hugh Grant play a sleazebag before he made a whole late career out of it.

Pick of the Week

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4. Easy. It's the smartest, most competent show any of these merging dinosaurs currently produces, and it's got a two-season fuse burning. Get in now, because when this deal finally closes, whether in a courtroom or a fire sale, this is exactly the kind of expensive, actually-good thing the new owners will look at and go, "what's the ROI on the Gorn."

The Closer

So the scoreboard this week: Paramount can't sell itself, He-Man can't earn back half his budget, and the biggest new comedy on premium cable is about a comic-book-store clerk sued into saving the multiverse. Twelve attorneys general have decided this is the competitive marketplace worth going to war to preserve. I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying if you handed a Martian this week's release calendar and told him it was the crown jewel of American culture, he'd get back in the ship. Boldly. Somewhere Paramount legally cannot follow.

See you next week.