The order freezing Paramount's Warner Bros. deal expires today, and no injunction has replaced it

Everyone knows Paramount Skydance won the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery. Fewer people know that the acquisition has still not closed, that the court order usually credited with stopping it expires today, and that no preliminary injunction has taken its place.

The bidding contest is the best documented part. On 17 February 2026 Warner Bros. Discovery's board unanimously recommended that shareholders vote for a merger with Netflix, while disclosing that Netflix had granted a seven day waiver allowing the company to talk to Paramount Skydance, and that a Paramount representative had orally indicated it would pay $31 a share while stating that $31 was not its best and final proposal. On 26 February the board determined that Paramount's revised proposal was a "Company Superior Proposal" under the Netflix agreement. That announcement put the price at $31.00 a share in cash, added a quarterly ticking fee of $0.25 a share from after 30 September 2026, and disclosed a $7 billion regulatory termination fee and a $2.8 billion Netflix termination fee payable by Paramount, with Larry Ellison and an associated trust committing further equity as needed. Netflix had four business days to respond and did not top it. Shareholders approved on 23 April 2026, with the company saying they had voted overwhelmingly in favour and that closing remained subject to regulatory clearances. Compiled accounts of the deal put the total at about $110.9 billion and record clearance by the Department of Justice on 12 June 2026.

Then it stopped. A group of Democratic state attorneys general led by California filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on 13 July 2026, in State of California et al. v. Paramount Skydance Corporation, case number 4:26-cv-07116, assigned to Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin. The Writers Guild of America West and Writers Guild of America East brought a related action, case number 26-cv-07212, and the two were heard together.

The docket shows how tight the sequence was. The states moved for a temporary restraining order. Argument was heard on 17 July 2026 and ran an hour and 16 minutes, with James Weingarten appearing for all plaintiffs and Jeffrey Kessler for all defendants. An emergency motion for the judge's recusal was denied as moot at the same hearing. The court took the matter under submission and undertook to rule in writing by 22 July. It granted the restraining order on 20 July 2026, enjoining the merger.

The order everyone cites was always short lived. As the court recorded on 23 July, the restraining order was set to expire on 3 August 2026. In that order, headed "Order re Scheduling and Extending Temporary Restraining Order", Judge Martinez-Olguin extended it by a further 14 days, through 17 August 2026, while making the constraint explicit. Despite what she described as the defendants' stated willingness to hold off the merger for several weeks, she wrote that the court was unwilling to test the boundaries of its authority by extending the restraining order beyond the 28 days permitted by Rule 65 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Twenty eight days from 20 July is 17 August. There is no further extension available on that instrument.

What filled the gap was an agreement rather than an order. On 24 July the court granted a stipulation not to close, entered across the states' case, the writers' guilds' case and a third related matter. The parties, in other words, undertook to keep the companies apart while the preliminary injunction motions were briefed and heard. A hearing on the writers' guilds' preliminary injunction motion was set for the afternoon of 3 August 2026 in Oakland.

As of the most recent entries on the public docket, dated 13 August 2026, no ruling on either preliminary injunction motion has been entered. The court issued a preliminary scheduling order on 4 August 2026 requiring a joint case management statement by noon on 13 August and setting an initial case management conference for 19 August 2026 at 10am in Oakland, two days after the restraining order lapses. The joint statement was filed on 13 August.

The trial date is fixed and distant. The same 4 August order records that all sides estimated a trial of about 12 days, and sets it to run for 12 court days beginning Tuesday 2 March 2027 and ending 19 March 2027, dark on 8 and 15 March for the court's calendar, sitting from 8.30am to 1.30pm. A final pretrial conference is set for 24 February 2027, and proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law are due by noon on 5 April 2027.

So the position on 17 August 2026 is narrower than the headlines suggest. A judge has found enough in the states' case to freeze a $110.9 billion transaction once, on an emergency basis, for the maximum period the rules allow. She has not yet decided whether to enjoin it pending trial. What is not known is whether a preliminary injunction will issue before or at the 19 August conference, and, if it does not, whether the parties' stipulation not to close holds for the 18 months between now and judgment.