Back in 2023, a lawsuit was filed that had the potential to cost Paramount $200 million. Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming platform, Max, had paid a large chunk of money for the streaming rights to “South Park.” Not only would they get the back catalog of episodes, but exclusive streaming rights for what was then the upcoming seasons of 24, 25, and 26. Seems pretty simple, except it’s not. It gets pretty complicated pretty fast and resulted in Warner Bros. Discovery filing a lawsuit against Paramount for breach of contract.
We already reported on what led up to this, but we’ll give a brief recap. Warner Bros. Discovery is alleging Paramount+ is violating their contract in two main ways. The first is that Paramount and South Park Digital Studios were supposed to deliver 10 episodes per season; as that’s what all the most recent seasons had. Paramount argued back that the contract never specified how many episodes each new season would be. Additionally, Warner Bros. Discovery alleges the “South Park” specials that were created to exclusively stream on Paramount+ were in violation of the contract.
Justice Margaret A. Chan heard a motion to dismiss, and her ruling to proceed is definitely not good news for Paramount. Justice Chan says South Park Digital Studios took “advantage of the contract’s ambiguity,” and that they “unilaterally and arbitrarily” made the decision to create specials that were outside of the streaming deal. Particularly damning in terms of the potential monetary damages is how Justice Chan determined that Paramount was profiting off of these specials that could’ve been a revenue source for Max.
Outside of the advancement of the lawsuit itself the other reason this is so hurtful for Paramount is how the discovery phase can now begin. This means lawyers for Warner Bros. Discovery can start requesting information that Paramount definitely would not want to give up. This can include ratings and financial figures and internal documents relating to the creation of the specials. It’s the kind of thing that could make a company want to settle, if Warner Bros. Discovery would even accept a settlement at this point.
Prior to this development, the question wasn’t so much if Paramount was playing dirty with the contract but whether it rose to the level of tortious interference. It was pretty clear that Paramount wanted a piece of “South Park” for their own streaming service, but they already auctioned off the rights before really building up their own platform.
We’ll let you know what we hear about this and other news.
