GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Paramount weighs leaving California over Warner Bros. rift.

As California tries to derail Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount CEO David Ellison’s friends and advisers have been pushing the media executive to consider shifting his business out of the state.

Ellison’s confidantes have pushed him to consider moving its corporate headquarters and reallocating much of its $30 billion in planned spending outside the state if California Attorney General Rob Bonta were to sue to stop the merger, according to people familiar with the discussions.

No decisions have been made, these people said, and the considerations may just be a show of brinkmanship, given so much of the industry’s production takes place outside of Hollywood already. Under the current deal, Paramount has committed to keeping both companies’ lots operational if it remains in California.

But Paramount would not be the first major company to decamp from California in recent years due to tussles with state regulators: Chevron relocated its corporate headquarters from San Ramon to Texas two years ago, while Oracle and Tesla have made similar moves to the Lone Star State.

Paramount does have at least one short-term option: The company last year signed a lease in Bayonne, New Jersey, for nearly 300,000 square feet of studio space and could expand operations there.

To revise and extend the remarks by the late P.J. O’Rourke, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and you can’t make movies in Hollywood. That’s all you need to know about communism.