It might be the Chipotle bowl I just wolfed down, but I have a feeling the nausea I’m currently experiencing is because a corporation throwing billions of dollars at another corporation in an effort to control the media and news landscape of the country has effectively finished. Sixty-forty, at least. At any rate, Paramount Skydance has put in their counteroffer to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. The WBD board has deemed it to be a “superior proposal.” (News from Variety.) Hot on the heels of that, Netflix CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters released a statement Thursday saying the company will bow out. (News via THR.) The statement says the deal is “no longer financially attractive” and that it “was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”
The firestorm of companies trying to buy each other began last year when Warner Bros. Discovery for seemingly no reason at all put itself up for sale. Netflix swooped in to buy WB and HBO Max, for what would have been worth $83 million. Almost instantly, Paramount Skydance—itself just merging the year prior—demanded they be in the running too. When WBD initially rejected Paramount’s first counteroffer, PSKY launched a very public hostile takeover bid.
Paramount’s second counteroffer amounts to nearly $111 billion, all in cash, or $31 per share for the stakeholders. Netflix had four days to come up with a same-or-better offer but almost instantly backed down.
One of the biggest issues facing either side in purchasing Warner Brothers Discovery is going before the Justice Department who has to okay such massive mergers. Given PSKY’s CEO David Ellison is the son of Trump bestie Larry Ellison, it all but guarantees a speedy regulatory period. In fact, PSKY was so confident, it pledged to pay $7 billion to WBD out of pocket as a “break-up fee” if the Trump Administration were to put a kibosh on the deal. That’s like saying “I’ll give you a unicorn if the sun doesn’t come up tomorrow.” They could have pledged $70 billion. You pretty much know the outcome.
Trump has been very public (as opposed to when he’s not very public, which is never) that he was pulling for Paramount in this deal. Netflix would have needed a miracle, plus likely even more capital, to stay competitive in the battle. The elder Ellison is the third-richest person in the world and one of the president’s closest allies. Sarandos didn’t stand a chance.
All of this is, to coin a phrase, bad. Bad for the landscape of media in the U.S. and the world, bad for free and fair news journalism, and especially bad for consumers. Any time anyone owns too much of a market, prices go up. That’s why we shouldn’t have monopolies. Since Skydance bought Paramount, we’ve seen unprecedented silencing of voices critical of the Trump Administration and its frankly repugnant policies and actions. Now, the Ellisons will own CBS News and CNN.
Anyway, I need to go take some Pepcid or something; I fear I may hurl.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
The post Netflix Bows Out of Warner Bros. Purchase, Paramount to Win appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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