Michael Barbaro

Kyle, you cover the movies for The Times and the actors and the directors involved in making them.

You brilliantly profile them week in, week out, and you cover the awards season.

Does that do you justice?

And only the surface.

And Lauren, you write about corporate mergers, and you've been steeped in the details of this particular deal.

Yes.

Okay.

So just to give us a little bit of a roadmap, we're going to spend a lot of time in this conversation talking through the implications of Warner Brothers' discovery ending up in the hands of either of its current major suitors.

But I think we have to start at the boardroom level first.

because that's literally where it begins.

There are a lot of moguls and multi-billion dollar media brands involved in this battle.

And so we're going to bring each of the major players on stage one by one.

Kyle, give us the Cliff Notes version of the protagonist of this story, Warner Brothers.

Why?

And of course, one of those parts is HBO, the gold standard of television.

Yes.

Lauren, I think this is where you come into the conversation because the realization that Warner Brothers Discovery is going to be broken up, potentially sold, brings in our second protagonist in this story, which is Paramount.

So just give us the quick backstory of Paramount's place in this showdown.

Really rich family.

And we should just say that was a very small brand eating a very huge brand.