Update: DOJ Announces It Will Move to Lower the Curtain on 70-Year-Old Paramount Consent Decrees
Last October, we discussed the Department of Justice’s announcement that it would be revisiting the 1948 Paramount Consent Decrees, a series of movie-studio concessions and divestments resulting from a landmark antitrust prosecution, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948). Among other things, those decrees held unlawful the then-existing vertical integration of production studios, distributors, and exhibitors (i.e., theaters) and held various prevailing practices—“block booking” (bundling movie licenses and strong-arming theaters into accepting all of a studio’s movies); “circuit dealing” ( obtaining mass licenses for entire theater chains, instead of for individual theaters and films); overbroad “clearances” (selling exclusive exhibition licenses for certain geographical areas); and setting minimum movie-ticket prices—to be impermissibly anticompetitive. Yesterday, Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim announced the results of that review at the American Bar Association’s 2019 Antitrust Fall Forum. He confirmed that the DOJ would, indeed, be seeking to dissolve the 70-year-old Decrees.