Joe Flint

Appreciate it.

It's part of your drama.

And the idea was that they'd have this supercharged streamer of the best of HBO, the best of Discovery.

You'd have CNN in there, and then you'd still own these movie and TV studios, and it would be the ultimate Hollywood giant.

Warner decided earlier this year to break itself into two separate companies.

They were going to put the streaming and studios into one standalone company and then the cable networks such as CNN into another publicly traded company.

The cable networks were seen as a drag on the Warner stock.

So they thought that if they split the company apart, you'd have this one company that would have the movie studios and TV studios and HBO Max, all these sexy properties.

And then the other company would have, you know, what is still a good cash business, but seen as a melting ice cube in the cable network universe.

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.