Joe Flint

So they did that, and there was always an anticipation that doing that, when it was all done, there might be some interest from big players in buying those Hollywood entertainment assets.

Paramount was recently acquired by David Ellison and his Skydance Media Group.

Now, Ellison had, in the back of his mind, had the idea of

getting Paramount and then going after Warner.

So once he got Paramount, you know, he started to turn his eye immediately to Warner.

So the idea of combining Paramount and Warner and you've got this tremendous library and the real potential to build a streaming service that could rival Netflix, that was what was appealing to Ellison.

Yes, a lot of consolidation, a lot of mergers.

Paramount decided we don't want to wait a couple years and face a potential bidding war.

So we're going to try to buy the whole company right now.

Well, from my own reporting, I don't think they were necessarily thrilled by unsolicited kind of aggressive bids that they also felt were lowball offers.

But the challenge is once you've had a certain number of offers and they've become public, we're all writing about them, as a company, you're kind of forced to at least address it and perhaps do what they did, which was open up a process to begin an auction.

So even though Netflix is kind of steered clear of big mergers, big deals, they always say we're a builder, not a buyer.

An asset like Warner Brothers that has a lot of classic IP, superhero franchises, great old TV shows, a lot of content that Netflix already knows works on its platform because they've aired a lot of those shows and movies there.

So they know this is good stuff.

Yeah, we're in Squid Game territory right now.

They're taking it to shareholders.

And so now this will get uglier between Netflix and Warner and Paramount.

You know, we'll see how it all plays out.

This was them making their case to the analysts why they were doing this.

So basically they were saying that they firmly believe that their offer is better than Netflix's offer and that this process to bid on these assets has not been fair, that it was inherently biased in favor of Netflix versus Paramount.