Paramount to Acquire Warner Bros. Discovery

Two months after Netflix agreed to purchase Warner Bros. and several other parts of Warner Bros. Discovery the deal is off. Now Paramount Skydance will acquire the entire WBD conglomerate after upping its bid.

After Paramount upped its offer to $31.00 per share in cash, along with a “$7 billion regulatory termination fee payable by PSKY in the event the transaction does not close due to regulatory matter” plus an additional $2.8 billion that will now be paid to Netflix for terminating their earlier agreement, Warner Bros. Discovery’s board deemed it the “superior” offer. They then gave Netflix four days to match it.

Instead, Netflix took a matter of hours to decide that was more than they were willing to pay. In a statement, Netflix’s CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said:

The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.

They thanked WBD for “running a fair and rigorous process” but said that the deal to buy Warner Bros. movie studio as well as HBO and HBO Max “was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”

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The deal will totally reshape not only Hollywood but television, cable, streaming and even news — as Paramount Skydance, which has already made massive changes to CBS News after acquiring that brand in 2024, will now control CNN as well. Other arms of WBD like DC Comics, HBO, the Looney Tunes, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and many more will also fall under Paramount’s control.

As for Netflix, they lost out on the movie studio and all those valuable IP. But it got paid $2.8 billion for not buying a company. That’s a pretty good deal, all things considered.