Acquiring more Hollywood gives you more things to sell; the audience retains its deeply inconvenient right to stay home.

Street Fighter is heading for a $30 million opening, Deadline estimated Friday, at the lower end of expectations. The filmgoer gets a vote even after everyone has finished congratulating the dealmakers. Annoyingly, it requires a fresh ticket purchase.

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have become Skydance Corp. Investors have greeted the enlarged company with doubts about what David Ellison paid. Hollywood has successfully consolidated the anxiety.

Last week, we wrote about Warner’s departing film chiefs. Their successors inherit the particularly charming assignment of making future releases justify somebody else’s acquisition.

Street Fighter supplies a separate, immediate test of audience appetite. Its opening estimate can still move over the weekend. Getting people through the door remains a transaction Hollywood has to close one seat at a time.