In yet another colossal move of consolidation in American entertainment media, Warner Bros. Discovery is up for sale, and the sharks are circling. One of the most overt pursuers of the massive company that’s teeming with popular IPs and licenses has been Paramount Skydance.
However, their three overtures continued to hit headlines, only emboldening their potential bidding foes. Now, it’s said, Comcast and Netflix are primed to cast their lines in. Prior to the opening of the formal sale process, Paramount’s owners, the Ellison family, had to make clear the origins of some of their funding for the bid.
Amassing $71 billion for a WBD bid
The mass media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) reported revenues of over $39 billion in 2024. It marked a continued run of losses under the leadership of David Zaslav, who commenced his term in 2022 with a mass culling of ongoing productions. Even with the downturn, it’s a titan of entertainment.
So, it’ll take one hefty bid to acquire Warner Bros. According to anonymous sources, Paramount Skydance reckons that figure will be around the $71 billion mark. To reach this figure, those reports mused that sovereign wealth funds from the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia were joining their consortium for the big bid.
Since those reports, a representative of Paramount Skydance has come forward to say that the information is “categorically inaccurate.” How they raise the cash won’t be disclosed for a while, it seems. However, antitrust watchdogs have already perked up at the idea of a Netflix-WBD merger, blending HBO Max with Netflix.
While HBO Max is Netflix’s largest dedicated competitor in the US market, we’ve seen other deals that have been flagged for anti-trust go through in the US of late. Microsoft was free to eat up ZeniMax Media and Activision in short order, and Disney was allowed to shove 21st Century Fox into its hefty bag.
A Dramatic Library Expansion
Paramount is already home to several strong IPs, but adding Warner Bros. Discovery would drastically bolster its offering. Two headline acts on either side, just to show the strength of this potential combination, would be The Terminator franchise under Skydance at Paramount, with Rick and Morty of Adult Swim under WBD.
A colossus of cinema and a perpetual adult animation hit, the two typify the reach of the IPs in play. Both boast expansive franchises, spanning all forms of entertainment media, from spin-off shows like Rick and Morty: The Anime and The Sarah Connor Chronicles to video games like Pocket Mortys and the new Terminator 2D: No Fate, and even slots. The two are among the most prominent of the branded slots at the jackpot casino right now. Of the collections, Rick and Morty Strike Back and Terminator 2 are the picks of the bunch.
On top of this, Paramount already owns South Park, broadcast rights for the UFC, Paramount+, FuboTV, PlutoTV, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, CBS, Transformers, Scream, and many more. WBD would bring Harry Potter, WB Games, DC Comics, Discovery, Cartoon Network, CNN, HBO, New Line Cinema, and Middle-earth film rights.
Impressively, or perhaps ominously, Warner Bros. Discovery would be the second major acquisition of current head David Ellison in under a year. His first was to gobble up Paramount from the base of Skydance earlier this year. Even back then, he wasn’t shy about sharing his intent to get WBD.
Paramount Skydance has some stiff competition in this titanic bidding war, but should they succeed, the company will be able to go toe-to-toe with some of America’s largest entertainment corporations.
