Warner Bros. Discovery has rejected a takeover offer of around $20 per share from Paramount Skydance in recent weeks. The company regarded the offer as “too low,” according to Bloomberg.
WBD shares closed at $17.10 per share Friday, up more than 36% since the news broke of Paramount’s interest in bidding for the rival. The Bloomberg story did not mention whether Paramount’s bid included the assumption of WBD’s total debt, which as of June 30, was $35.6 billion.
Paramount, which is led by David Ellison, has reportedly been exploring several paths in its bid for Warner Bros., including increasing its offer, appealing directly to shareholders or securing extra support from a financial partner. The company has been in the talks with alternative asset manager Apollo Global Management about backing its bid.
READ: Paramount-Skydance’s $8 billion merger gets greenlit by FCC (
While Ellison did not confirm Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros., at last week’s Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles, he talked about why he thinks Paramount needs to bolt on more content-producing engines to achieve sustainable growth in today’s streaming-centric world and cited WBD chief David Zaslav’s comments that the industry needs more consolidation.
“I do think there’s a lot of [M&A] options out there in terms of what actually might be actionable in the near future,” Ellison said at the conference. “You actually need more content to yield more engagement. And so we would actually want to be in the business, through whatever lens we’re looking at” to produce “more movies, more television series” to get more scale and engagement.
READ: Paramount asks employees: return to office or exit (
Paramount Skydance’s bid for Warner Bros Discovery might be for the company in its entirety, according to a Wall Street Journal report. This comes ahead of WBD’s plans to split into two separate companies next spring — Warner Bros., comprising studios and streaming, and Discovery Global, including TV networks and Discovery+.
Earlier this year, Paramount Global merged with Skydance Media in a $8.4 billion merger. This deal put well-known entertainment properties including the CBS broadcast television network, Paramount Pictures, and the Nickelodeon cable channel under the ownership of Skydance CEO David Ellison, who is also the son of Oracle cofounder and world’s second richest person, Larry Ellison. Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) regulators voted 2-1 along party lines to give the deal a green light. This came amid allegations of political interference due to President Donald Trump’s intense criticism of Paramount’s CBS News division.