The battle over WBD left three big winners on Wall Street

It all began last December when WBD agreed to sell its Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max streaming service to the streaming giant Netflix. Days later, Paramount Skydance lobbed in a hostile bid to buy all of WBD. Amid multiple twists and turns—and the CEOs of both bidding companies separately visiting President Trump to make their cases—WBD declared on Feb. 26 that it would agree to Paramount’s bid, which had gone through various permutation to make it more appealing. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos declined to sweeten the offer, saying that for Netflix the deal had always been nice-to-have, not need-to-have.

Such a public battle could have left everyone involved bruised. But investors seem to have decided that no one lost, rewarding all three companies. Least surprising was the 12% leap in Netflix’s stock price on news of the deal. Wall Street had thought all along that WBD was an overpriced acquisition. (Netflix would have paid $83 billion to WBD.) Investors were glad to see the streamer put aside its ambition of owning the traditional Hollywood studio. As for WBD itself, investors clearly felt Paramount was paying a decent price for the entire company. On news of the deal, WBD stock barely budged; it was almost exactly where it had been in December when the whole fray began.

Most unexpected was Paramount stock’s jump. Wall Street almost always disdains giant acquisitions on the theory that buyers get too excited about big deals and overpay—and indeed, that’s usually what happens. When the deal gets sealed, the buyer’s stock usually drops, but in this case it rose almost 30%. That’s probably because analysts were pleasantly surprised: They had figured Paramount would need to raise its offer from $30 to $32-$34 a share to vanquish Netflix; instead, Paramount offered just $31 and prevailed.

But despite the upbeat mood on Wall Street, every big deal includes losers. And this is no exception: Assuming it goes through, the losers in this deal will be Hollywood’s unseen entertainment workers—the writers, non-star actors, directors, set designers, and others, whose numbers have been decreasing for years.

In 2022 Los Angeles County had 145,000 workers in the motion picture industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, it was 104,000. One reason is decades of consolidation—deals like this one, most of them involving layoffs. When Paramount merged with Skydance last year, it laid off about 15% of its workforce, about 2,600 employees.

Closing the acquisition of Warner is expected to take at least nine months as regulators examine the deal. If and when the purchase happens, Paramount has said it will find $6 billion of “cost synergies.”

Unions representing Hollywood’s rank and file have been expressing concerns since the beginning of this roller coaster ride of a bidding process. In October, the Writers’ Guild of America called upon regulators to block any deal merger or acquisition of WBD, saying it “would be a disaster for writers, for consumers, and for competition.”  

“Merger after merger in the media industry has harmed workers, diminished competition and free speech, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars better invested in organic growth,” said the WGA.