When the credits finally rolled on the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war this week, it wasn’t the world’s largest streamer standing on the lot. It was Paramount Skydance, another legacy Hollywood studio with a subscale streaming business struggling under a massive debt load.
Netflix formally withdrew its bid on Thursday after Warner’s board deemed Paramount’s latest offer “superior,” ending months of brinksmanship that played out as a throwback, even a sequel of sorts, to the great takeover battles of the 1980s and ’90s, many of them involving Warner and Paramount. Like so many of those battles of yore, particularly Barry Diller losing out to Sumner Redstone in the contest to acquire Paramount in 1994, this becomes yet another “what if” in a Hollywood history littered with them.
