Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery bid would combine big content houses
Paramount+ sign in the Times Square neighborhood of New York on Thursday, December 21st.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
David Ellison seems to be getting a media empire.
According to people who are familiar with the subject of anonymity, Warner Bros. He touched an investment bank to help prepare a package offer for Discovery.
According to familiar people, Warner Bros. Discovery had not yet received an offer on Thursday. However, the company’s shares increased by almost 30% in the afternoon and recorded the best trading day of the stock.
Representatives of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery avoided commenting.
Warner Bros. Folding Discovery will add Ellison to its growing franchise purchases and sports media rights list. Explaining that it plans to be allocated to two organizations in June, WBD has a series of desired assets. Add them to Paramount’s intellectual properties collection and can be a content giant in Ellison hands.
“An offer for WBD will strengthen the ignored value of the asset portfolio weighed by the balance sheet,” Moffettnathanson analyst Robert Fishman said on Thursday. He said.
A content mountain
Already at home, Paramount, Star Trek, Transformers, SpongEBOB Squarepants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Paw Patrol, Scream and Mission Impossible has film and television shows.
More recently, it has expanded its video game -based IP beyond Sonic The Hedgehog, A billion -dollar franchise, on its own, to overcome the right to call a task theatrical film and to distribute the right to distribution to legendary street hunter adaptation.
Warner Bros. Discovery has a large large franchise library like DC superheroes, the Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and Harry Potter. There are also old cartoons such as Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. He is also the distributor of Legendary’s Dune Franchise and Godzilla and King Kong films.
Last year, Warner Bros. The second highest gross studio and Comscore in the global box office was the fifth highest.
In addition to supporting Paramount’s theater Arduvaz, Warner Bros. Discovery’s flow service HBO Max is counting more than 125 million subscribers from the end of the second quarter. Paramount+ currently has about 77 million flow users.
Chasing espn
Following the merger of Paramount-Skydance in Ellison The seven -year agreement of $ 7.7 billion to choose Paramount for TKO Group’s UFC Mixed Fighting Arts Organization. The agreement means that the UFC will stop the payment model per imaging, and events can be used directly to paramount+ subscribers and in some cases CBS.
Sports rights are low and only when previous opportunities end, they become available. Apple Formula 1 is expected to be the home and Major League Baseball is waiting for the end of its agreements to reorganize media packages after 2028 season. This means that Paramount will bid in the medium term and will have fewer upper shelf sports to obtain.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Discovery has the right to publish games from the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and March Madness Basketball with French Open and Nascar.
A potential binding between Paramount Skydance and WBD will expand the intellectual property library of Paramount and a sports content from the top. Disney Espn.
