<\/p>\n
Today, WBD\u2019s board announced<\/a> that it has unanimously decided that its shareholders would be much better off rejecting Paramount Skydance and accepting Netflix\u2019s bid to buy the company\u2019s studio production and streaming arms. The news comes weeks after WBD first said that it was ready to take Netflix up on its $82.7 billion acquisition offer, and days after Paramount tried to keep the bidding war going by upping its offer to $108 billion<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In a statement about WBD\u2019s decision to rebuff Paramount\u2019s advances yet again, board chair Samuel A. Di Piazza, Jr., described the David Ellison-owned company\u2019s latest offer as \u201cinadequate\u201d and warned that it would come with \u201csignificant risks and costs imposed on our shareholders.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis offer once again fails to address key concerns that we have consistently communicated to Paramount throughout our extensive engagement and review of their six previous proposals,\u201d Piazza said. \u201cWe are confident that our merger with Netflix represents superior, more certain value for our shareholders and we look forward to delivering on the compelling benefits of our combination.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In a statement of their own<\/a>, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters echoed Piazza\u2019s sentiments about Paramount Skydance\u2019s \u201cunsolicited, inferior and illusory\u201d offer being a risky, uncertain bet for WBD\u2019s shareholders. They also described the entire bidding process \u2014 which led to them being the current frontrunners to win \u2014 as having \u201cdelivered the best outcome for consumers, creators, stockholders and the broader entertainment industry.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cNetflix and Warner Bros. complement each other, and we\u2019re excited to combine our strengths with their theatrical film division, world-class television studio, and the iconic HBO brand, which will continue to focus on prestige television,\u201d Sarandos said. \u201cWe\u2019re also fully committed to releasing Warner Bros. films in theaters, with a traditional window, so audiences everywhere can enjoy them on the big screen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Peters added that a Netflix \/ WBD acquisition deal would be \u201cfundamentally pro-consumer, pro-innovation, pro-creator and pro-growth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n CEOs trash talking their peers during these kinds of competitions is to be expected, but the WBD board\u2019s insistence that selling to Paramount Skydance would be a bad idea feels very reasonable right now because one of the big partners backing Ellison\u2019s bid is pulling out. Bloomberg reports<\/a> that Jared Kushner\u2019s Affinity Partners private equity group is no longer part of the consortium of entities \u2014 which also includes sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar \u2014 that were giving Paramount Skydance money for its all-cash bid to buy WBD in its entirety. It still is not clear exactly how much money Affinity Partners was providing in the grand scheme of things, but the firm\u2019s connections to Kushner, president Donald Trump\u2019s son-in-law, represented a major conflict of interest given that any deal to buy WBD would require regulatory approval from Trump\u2019s Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No matter who buys WBD<\/a> (or any parts of it), the outcomes are almost certainly going to be bad <\/em>for consumers and the larger entertainment industry as a whole. But the implications of a Paramount Skydance \/ WBD merger seemed uniquely terrible when you considered who was financing it and how Ellison has handled<\/a> other media companies that he has recently bought<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.celebrity.land \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today, WBD\u2019s board announced that it has unanimously decided that its shareholders would be much better off rejecting Paramount Skydance and accepting Netflix\u2019s bid to buy the company\u2019s studio production and streaming arms. The news comes weeks after WBD first said that it was ready to take Netflix up on its $82.7 billion acquisition offer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2120587,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741,21799,23808,22077],"class_list":["post-2202971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-streaming","tag-tv-shows"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Warner-Bros-mergers-never-work-but-theyre-trying-again-anyway.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202971"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202972,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202971\/revisions\/2202972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2120587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}