By Jennifer Asencio
| Revealed
The bidding warfare over Warner Bros. Discovery is over, and it appears to be like like Paramount has emerged because the victor. Netflix has dropped its bid for the century-old studio and manufacturing firm, and it’s now within the palms of Paramount Skydance. This information has rocked the leisure business and sparked hypothesis about the way forward for Warner Bros. properties, together with HBO, CNN, and the DC Comics cinematic universe, which incorporates Batman, Superman, and Surprise Girl amongst its well-known superheroes.
The sale of the Warner Brothers film assortment has been a hot-button concern for many who watch the leisure business. Netflix introduced that it dropped its bid to amass the catalog, leaving Paramount because the profitable bid. It value Paramount Skydance Studios an estimated $111 billion to safe a catalog going again greater than a century.
Three Bidders Enter, One Bidder Leaves
Netflix was relying on Warner Bros.’s historical past of success within the leisure business to spice up its personal catalogue, given its relative newcomer standing in film manufacturing and distribution. So was Paramount, which made a bid for the floundering studio and its belongings in September 2025. Warner Bros. formally rejected this provide in October, which enabled each Comcast and Netflix to make their very own bid.
Ultimately, Comcast dropped out, and so far as anybody might inform, solely Netflix was a viable participant on the sector with a suggestion approaching $82.7 billion. This rankled WBD stockholder Ancora Options LLC, which held out its vote on February 11, 2026, on the grounds that Paramount’s complaints of favoritism towards Netflix had been true. This reopened the bidding and allowed Paramount till February 23, 2026, to make a qualifying “superior provide” for Warner Bros.
Netflix had three days to make a counteroffer and introduced on February 26, 2026, that it might not accomplish that.
Warner Bros Has Been A Tax Write Off For Years
Your entire deal has been coated in controversy. For just a few years, Warner Bros. has been writing off properties for tax functions, together with total motion pictures and tv exhibits. This included digital properties individuals had bought for themselves that all of a sudden disappeared from their libraries with no rationalization. These tax write-offs had been additionally a sign of how a lot bother the corporate was in.
Paramount’s transfer to make its preliminary bid was seen as an try at a hostile takeover. Warner Bros. and Paramount have been opponents for over a century. Combining their libraries places a big quantity of cinematic and tv historical past underneath one umbrella. A profitable Netflix bid would have given Netflix the lion’s share of the streaming market, because it presently controls over 19% whereas Paramount and Warner Bros. every management virtually 11%. Because it stands, Paramount is poised to regulate extra of the market than Netflix and could be second solely to Disney+ and its streaming companions, Hulu and Fubo.
Warner Bros. and Paramount additionally personal a number of information providers between them, together with CNN and CBS. CBS Information has been underneath fireplace of its personal after the ascension of Bari Weiss as information editor. Social media has been abuzz with viewers who’re cautious of Weiss probably controlling CNN as a result of they assume she is just too pleasant to President Trump in her editorial selections. That is regardless of Weiss being a centrist who has been essential of Trump in her earlier work.
Extra Content material Silos In Our Future?
One other concern is the potential for lowering entry to media that’s already seeing elevated siloing of content material. Leisure firms push out their very own apps or merge with different firms to consolidate their smaller catalogs, because the union of Paramount and Warner Bros. is about to do. The Paramount Plus app is notoriously buggy and even failed for some customers in the course of the Survivor 50 premiere on Wednesday, February 25. Paramount already excludes a lot of its content material produced earlier than the Nineteen Eighties, and acquiring a long-standing rival’s library might imply the Warner Bros. and HBO collections get the identical therapy.
Paramount’s Destruction Of Beloved Properties
Lastly, there may be the difficulty of Paramount virtually destroying its personal properties. Starfleet Academy has been criticized for poor writing, the destruction of Star Trek lore, and gratuitous inclusion in locations the place such inclusion is not sensible. Coupled with the trajectory of applications like Survivorthe NCIS and CSI franchises, and infinite reboots of Matlock, Hawaii 5-O, and MacGuyver, indicators present that the leisure division is heading in a course that asks severe questions on what’s going to grow to be of Warner Bros. properties just like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter sequence, and the DC Universe, amongst others. HBO Max runs quite a few basic Akira Kurosawa motion pictures, like The Hidden Fortress and Rashomon: what’s going to grow to be of them underneath Paramount’s supervision?
Now that the deal is finalized, the subsequent step is to look at it for any antitrust points it raises. This may require scrutiny from quite a few governments in addition to the US, as a result of each nation Paramount desires to do enterprise in has a specific amount of enter within the proceedings.
Neither Netflix nor Paramount ought to have been capable of purchase Warner Bros. All of the gamers concerned, together with Comcast, symbolize important parts of the American and overseas streaming markets, in addition to leisure and information media. It shrinks the pool of main leisure firms to a mere 4.
Now, if the deal passes muster with anti-trust legal guidelines, two of the oldest studios in Hollywood are about to hitch forces, for higher or for worse.