seven-day waiver <\/a>under the terms of their agreement to reengage with Paramount, resulting in the higher bid. Paramount’s offer is for the entirety of WBD, including its pay TV networks, such as CNN, TBS and TNT. <\/p>\nNetflix had four business days to make changes to its own proposal in light of Paramount’s superior bid, the WBD board said in a statement Thursday. <\/p>\n
Instead, the decision by the streaming giant to walk away puts a pin in a drawn-out saga that saw amended offers from both bidders. <\/p>\n
“The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval,” Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said in a statement Thursday. “However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.<\/p>\n
The latest Paramount bid included a $7 billion breakup fee in the event the proposed merger doesn’t win regulatory approval. The company also agreed to pay the $2.8 billion breakup fee that WBD would owe Netflix if that deal didn’t go through. <\/p>\n
Sarandos told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in an interview last week that the company granted WBD the waiver to reopen Paramount talks in order to give shareholders clarity. <\/p>\n
“Paramount had been making a ton of noise, flooding the zone with confusion for shareholders … including floating all these hypothetical offers and talking directly to the shareholders and bypassing the Warner Bros. Discovery board,” Sarandos said at the time. “So we’ve given the opportunity to get those shareholders exactly what they deserve, which is complete clarity and certainty.”<\/p>\n
However, Sarandos had fallen short of commenting on whether Netflix would up its own offer to match a revised Paramount bid. <\/p>\n
“Warner Bros. is a world-class organization, and we want to thank David Zaslav, Gunnar Wiedenfels, Bruce Campbell, Brad Singer and the WBD Board for running a fair and rigorous process,” the Netflix co-CEOs said in their statement. <\/p>\n
“We believe we would have been strong stewards of Warner Bros.’ iconic brands, and that our deal would have strengthened the entertainment industry and preserved and created more production jobs in the U.S.,” they said.\u00a0“But this transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.” <\/p>\n
This news is developing. Please check back for updates.<\/p>\n
Read more about the Paramount-Netflix battle for WBD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos arrives at the White House on Feb. 26, 2026 in Washington, DC. Andrew Leyden…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[139178,43415,6461,354,357,135449,11007,146,85,46,34193,4274,156295,411,11603,4276],"class_list":{"0":"post-311998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-amc-networks-inc","9":"tag-att-inc","10":"tag-breaking-news-business","11":"tag-breaking-news-technology","12":"tag-business-news","13":"tag-charter-communications-inc","14":"tag-comcast-corp","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-il","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-netflix-inc","19":"tag-paramount-skydance-corp","20":"tag-screaming-eagle-acquisition-corp","21":"tag-tv","22":"tag-walt-disney-co","23":"tag-warner-bros-discovery-inc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}