THR Cover: Meet Makan Delrahim. For Hollywood and Silicon Valley, he’s the most feared man in Washington that is not named Donald Trump.
One day last spring, Makan Delrahim was checking in on the day's news when a story about the Oscars caught his eye. Steven Spielberg was said to be pushing the film Academy to ban from eligibility any movie that premiered on a streaming service rather than in theaters. At the time, Netflix had just won three awards for Alfonso Cuarón'sThat seemed unfair to Delrahim, 50, who in addition to leading the U.S.
Netflix also comes up when Delrahim addresses Disney's recent box office dominance. The company boasted eight of the top 10 performing movies in 2019 and captured 40 percent of domestic market share, yet the DOJ's Antitrust Office swiftly approved its purchase of Fox from Rupert Murdoch.
At the same time, Delrahim began dabbling in entertainment. In 2016, he executive produced a horror-comedy film starring Adrian Grenier called, which premiered at Sundance. Working with reality TV powerhouse Pilgrim Films , Delrahim created a pilot for a series about wrongfully convicted individuals. No network picked it up. Delrahim also became a board member for World Poker Tour.
The move ended up being rewarded. After Trump took office, Delrahim moved his wife and three kids to D.C. to work in the White House counsel's office, where he helped shepherd Neil Gorsuch's successful Supreme Court nomination. In March 2017, Trump nominated him as the nation's top antitrust enforcer; the Senate approved his appointment six months later.
This flexibility invites attacks from both conservative and liberal thinkers and makes it difficult to determine how Delrahim would approach any proposed deal. Take, for example, the DOJ's challenge to AT&T-Time Warner, the first time in decades that the government had sought to block a so-called "vertical" merger of companies with complementary, rather than similar, businesses.
In addition, the Antitrust Division has in recent months raised eyebrows about politicization of competition law.
Hollywood is watching closely because more mergers likely are coming. As new streamers like Disney+, AT&T's HBO Max, AppleTV+ and, soon, Comcast's Peacock seek to scale swiftly to compete with Netflix and Amazon Prime, speculation is rife that mid-major studios like Lionsgate, MGM or even Sony Pictures or ViacomCBS will soon be acquired by larger players. This has sparked concerns in the talent community because fewer studios could translate into suppressed wages.
Delrahim, though, would prefer to see the free market sort this out, and he leans into the possible benefits of fewer rules. For instance, he imagines that Disney could bundle its animation library and work with theaters to screen classics 24/7 with consumers able to purchase a MoviePass-type subscription to family-friendly fare.
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