“Netflix had the legal right to match the PSKY offer. As you all know, they ultimately decided not to do that. That then resulted in a signed agreement with PSKY as of this morning.”
Warner Bros. Discovery has agreed to be purchased by Paramount Skydance for $110 billion in a deal that was signed on Friday morning, according to a report from Reuters.
"Netflix had the legal right to match the PSKY offer. As you all know, they ultimately decided not to do that. That then resulted in a signed agreement with PSKY as of this morning. So that's where everything stands," Bruce Campbell, Warner Bros' chief revenue and strategy officer, said in the townhall where the deal was being discussed.
The deal includes some $29 billion in debt in addition to the payment, and it will be one of the largest media shake-ups in Hollywood. Paramount will now own the rights to the intellectual property formerly owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
After losing the bidding war on Thursday, Netflix CEO Greg Peters said, "The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we've always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance's latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid."
"Warner Bros. is a world-class organization, and we want to thank David Zaslav, Gunnar Wiedenfels, Bruce Campbell, Brad Singer and the WBD Board for running a fair and rigorous process. We believe we would have been strong stewards of Warner Bros.' iconic brands, and that our deal would have strengthened the entertainment industry and preserved and created more production jobs in the US. But this transaction was always a 'nice to have' at the right price, not a 'must have' at any price," the statement added.
The bid to purchase Warner Bros. will be sure to spark some shifts in the media landscape, which also shook up some of the staffers at CNN, who will now be under the ownership of Paramount, which is headed by David Ellison, seen as an ally of the Trump administration.
After news of the merger broke, some staffers frantically wrote messages on internal channels such as, "We are doomed," as well as "We are f*cked," in reaction to the news.
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