Dec. 8 (UPI) — Paramount Skydance launched a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery Monday after losing a bidding war with Netflix last week.
Paramount will place its bid directly to WBD shareholders, offering $30 per share, all cash. Paramount’s proposed transaction is for the entirety of WBD, including the Global Networks segment.
Netflix’s bid, announced Friday, offered WBD shareholders $23.25 in cash and $4.50 in shares of Netflix stock for each WBD stock. Under the Netflix bid, WBD’s linear networks business, which includes CNN, TNT, HGTV and Discovery+, will be spun out into a new publicly traded company in the third quarter of 2026.
Netflix, Paramount said, “offers inferior and uncertain value and exposes WBD shareholders to a protracted multi-jurisdictional regulatory clearance process with an uncertain outcome along with a complex and volatile mix of equity and cash.”
The new offer will give $18 billion more in cash than the Netflix consideration, Paramount said.
David Ellison, CEO of Paramount, and his family are funding the bid, along with private-equity firm RedBird Capital and $54 billion in debt commitments from Bank of America, Citi and Apollo Global Management, the press release said.
“We believe our offer will create a stronger Hollywood,” Ellison said in a statement. “It is in the best interests of the creative community, consumers and the movie theater industry.”
Shares of Paramount jumped 4% early Monday. Shares of WBD rose 6%, and Netflix fell 3%, CNBC reported.
“We’re really here to finish what we started,” Ellison told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Monday. “We put the company in play.”
Sunday night, President Donald Trump made comments that signaled the Netflix purchase would face regulatory hurdles. The merger has “to go through a process, and we’ll see what happens,” he told reporters from the red carpet of the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C.
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