Shares of Warner Bros. Discovery shot up as much as 33% Thursday on a report by the Wall Street Journal that Paramount Skydance is prepping a takeover bid of WBD in its entirety.
According to the Journal report, Paramount Skydance’s bid will be for Warner Bros. Discovery as it exists currently — despite WBD’s plans to split into two separate companies next year (Warner Bros., comprising studios and streaming, and Discovery Global, including TV networks and Discovery+). The article said the Paramount Skydance bid would be “majority cash” but did not specify a price.
Paramount Skydance’s offer for WBD, which cited anonymous sources, is “backed by the Ellison family,” according to the Journal. That’s a reference to Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder who is one of the world’s wealthiest individuals with a current net worth of $370 billion. He is the father of David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of the new Paramount Skydance. The Ellison family put up about $6 billion of the money for Skydance Media’s deal for Paramount Global, with around $2 billion contributed by private-equity firm RedBird Capital Partners.
Reps for Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery did not immediately respond to Variety‘s requests for comment.
Shares of Paramount Skydance, which trade under the symbol “PSKY,” were up over 10% on the report of its plans to make a takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery.
A major rationale fueling Paramount Skydance’s interest in buying Warner Bros. Discovery would be to pool their streaming operations — to achieve greater global scale and compete with larger rivals Netflix and Disney+/Hulu.
As of June 30, 2025, Paramount+ tallied 77.7 million subscribers, a decrease of 1.3 million in the quarter, primarily reflecting “the expiration of an international hard bundle deal,” Paramount Global said in posting second-quarter 2025 results (its last under the previous ownership). WBD’s direct-to-consumer streaming division, largely comprising HBO Max, had 125.7 million subscribers as of the end of June (gaining 3.4 million in the quarter) and the company has said it anticipates hitting more than 150 million subscribers by the end of 2026.
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David Ellison has outlined a tech-forward strategy to boost Paramount’s streaming business, which includes plans to consolidate Paramount+ and free, ad-supported streamer Pluto TV on a common tech stack. Ellison and Jeff Shell, Paramount Skydance’s president, also have discussed a desire to forge partnerships with other streamers.
At an Aug. 7 press conference in New York, just hours after the official close of Skydance’s Paramount deal, Ellison said that on the streaming front, “we’re open for business to explore everything.”
A combo of Paramount Skydance and WBD could also provide cost synergies and economies of scale for the companies’ film and TV network businesses. Paramount’s TV stable includes CBS, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV and BET, and WBD’s includes CNN, TNT, TBS, Discovery, Food Network and HGTV.
The Ellison family owns 100% voting control of Paramount Skydance. Skydance closed its takeover of Paramount Global five weeks ago following FCC approval of the deal, and the new owners have installed a new management team, which includes Shell, ex-Netflix exec Cindy Holland as head of the direct-to-consumer streaming business, and COO and chief strategy officer Andy Gordon, who formerly led the West Coast office of RedBird.
David Ellison has said the company (which calls itself “Paramount, a Skydance Corporation”) expects to cut more than $2 billion in costs from the company. That will include mass layoffs, with as many as 3,000 jobs expected to be eliminated by early November, Variety has reported.
Prior to Skydance clinching its deal in July 2024 for Paramount Global, which involved buying out previous controlling shareholder Shari Redstone, the CEOs of WBD (David Zaslav) and Paramount (then-CEO Bob Bakish) had discussed the possibility of a merger in late 2023. But those talks did not progress beyond an initial exploratory meetup.
From Variety US