Paramount Taking Warner Bros. to Court Over Netflix Sale Details

Paramount seems to think something doesn't pass the sniff test as WB rejects the company's latest bid.

The drama surrounding the sale of Warner Bros. continues, as the company has yet again mysteriously rejected Paramount's latest lucrative offer for the company. Indeed, the refusal to sell to Paramount, which is offering significantly better money than competitor Netflix, is so peculiar that the company has decided to take WB to court in order to ascertain the details of its rival's bid. The lawsuit was filed earlier this week.

Netflix announced in early December of last year that it was buying WB for $82.7 billion. While nothing to sneeze at certainly, Paramount's all-cash offer (currently at $108.7 billion) was and is significantly higher than what Netflix is offering. As Paramount puts it, "WBD has provided increasingly novel reasons for avoiding a transaction with [us] , but what it has never said, because ⁠it cannot, is that the Netflix ⁠transaction is financially superior to our ​actual offer."

Paramount seeks the Netflix deal data before the January 21 Paramount tender expiry, as well as Warner Bros. bylaw changes that would require an investor vote on the cable spinoff. Some pundits have speculated that part of WB's aversion to selling to Paramount is politically motivated, with concerns that Bari Weiss, now the head of CBS News, would bring a more centrist viewpoint to CNN, among other fears. While this is purely conjecture, it does have a ring of truth to it, particularly given how vehement WB has been in its repeated rejections of Paramount's seemingly superior offers.

Source: Reuters