Beginning next week, AT&T and the Justice Department will lock horns in court to determine if the telecommunications giant will be allowed to absorb the entertainment powerhouse Time Warner.

For the better part of a year and a half, the $85.4 billion acquisition was regarded, more or less, as a fait accompli. That changed completely in November, when the Justice Department moved to block the deal.

Now the talk in media circles revolves around what will happen if the acquisition is stopped and Time Warner — the owner of HBO, Warner Bros., CNN, TBS and TNT — is made an orphan. And what will it mean for the old-guard entertainment companies in the streaming age?

“I think it’s important for the ecosystem, the media ecosystem, that this deal goes through,” said David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery. “For the first time in the history of this business you have these massive global companies — Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Google — of a scale we’ve never seen. They’re like massive transformers.