The way was clear after Netflix’s withdrawal. Paramount Skydance will take over its competitor Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), valued at $110 billion (around 93 billion euros) including debt, it announced on Friday February 27, putting an end to a long-term battle with the streaming giant which gave up on Thursday to outbid the latest offer from the American television and cinema group, formulated at the start of the week.
Paramount Skydance was the first to submit a takeover proposal, in September 2025, before others, Netflix in particular, joined the fight. The boss of WBD, David Zaslav, has carried out a great operation, the fight between suitors having allowed the WBD share price to more than triple in less than a year.
This marriage will unite two similar groups, each trying to break into streaming to compensate for the decline of their traditional television channels, while producing content via studios. This is a new stage in the consolidation underway in Hollywood, which corresponds to the weakening of the traditional economic model of studios and television.
Large channel portfolio
In 2022, Discovery had already absorbed WarnerMedia to form WBD, under the leadership of the same David Zaslav, while in August 2025, Skydance swallowed Paramount Global. Previously, Disney had acquired, in 2019, most of the assets of the Fox group, including the 21st Century Fox studio. More anecdotally, because the group was much more modest in size, Amazon took control of the MGM studio in 2022.
As part of the merger announced Friday, the Paramount studio brings franchises like Mission: Impossible, Transformers Or Top Gunas well as an imposing catalog of classics. Warner Bros will put the sagas in its hands Harry Potter And The Lord of the Rings or the DC Universe superhero films (Batman and Superman in particular). In addition to the studios, the streaming platforms HBO Max and Paramount+ will be found under the same roof, which respectively had 131.6 million and 78.9 million subscribers at the end of 2025.
According to the Bloomberg agency, the boss of Paramount Skydance, David Ellison, plans to merge the two services to better position itself against Disney (174 million subscribers by adding Disney+ and Hulu) and Netflix (325 million). The merged group will also have a large portfolio of channels, from CBS to CNN, including Discovery, Eurosport, Comedy Central and MTV.
Traditional television remains an important source of profits for both companies, but the emergence of streaming and the contraction of cable television in the United States is causing them to shrink a little more each quarter.
David Ellison on the rise
The acquisition must still be approved by shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting on March 20 and validated by regulators, in particular that of telecommunications, the FCC. In July 2025, to obtain the green light for the absorption of Paramount Global, Skydance committed to the FCC to make, at the agency’s request, changes in editorial line within CBS, a very atypical condition. It was interpreted as a concession to Donald Trump, very critical of the channel, which he had sued in October 2024.
The epilogue of the Warner Bros Discovery saga marks the rise of David Ellison who, in just over fifteen years, transformed a start-up, Skydance, into a media empire through debt and daring acquisitions.
This operation will require an atypical financial package and the personal support of Larry Ellison, founder of the Oracle group and father of David Ellison. Paramount Skydance is thus preparing to swallow a company that weighs nearly five times its own market capitalization and will have to take on massive debt to do so.
As for Netflix, far from feeling sorry for themselves, investors welcomed its renunciation, the action of the world number one in streaming gaining 13.75% on Friday’s session alone. Many felt that the price offered by Paramount Skydance was too high.
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