Paramount Skydance’s tender offer for Warner Bros. Discovery emerged from months of fitful courtship, a shifting media landscape, and a high‑stakes bidding war that ultimately pitted the studio behind Top Gun: Maverick against streaming giant Netflix for control of one of Hollywood’s crown jewels. The company’s tender offer regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, filed hours after Paramount launched a hostile bid worth $108 billion (or $77.9 billion in equity), laid out a detailed chronology in which Paramount repeatedly tried to lure Warner Bros., to no avail. Netflix and Warner Bros. agreed to a deal worth nearly $83 billion ($72 billion in equity) on Friday.
The filing revealed Paramount CEO David Ellison’s last-ditch text message to WBD counterpart David Zaslav at roughly 4 p.m. ET on Dec. 4, the day before Netflix ultimately announced its deal, as previously reported by the Financial Times. “Daivd [sic], I appreciate you’re underwater today so I wanted to send you a quick text. Please note when you next meet as a board we wanted to offer you a package that addressed all of the issues you discussed we [sic] me,” Ellison wrote as he apparently felt his target slipping away.
