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Paramount Escalates Hollywood War with Hostile Strike on Warner Bros. Discovery

The battle for one of Hollywood’s most storied studios has officially exploded into a high-stakes corporate showdown. Paramount has launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, bypassing the company’s leadership and taking a bold all-cash offer of approximately $30 per share straight to shareholders.

This surprise move dramatically challenges the competing agreement Warner Bros. Discovery currently prefers — a stock-and-cash arrangement from Netflix that values the studio’s shares at about $27.75. That deal would also carve out CNN and Discovery’s cable businesses into separate entities before anything could close. Paramount, by contrast, wants everything: Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO, Max, DC, CNN, Discovery — the entire empire under one roof.

Paramount’s pitch to investors is simple and unapologetically aggressive: take the higher price, take the cleaner structure, and reject what it’s calling an inferior Netflix package. By going directly to shareholders, Paramount is signaling that Warner’s board made the wrong call — and it’s daring Wall Street to agree.

But the boardroom politics are now only one layer of this blockbuster storyline. The White House has already shown interest, with President Trump signaling concerns about Netflix growing too dominant if its deal succeeds. The message from Washington is clear: size matters in today’s media landscape, and regulators will not be passive spectators.

Paramount is betting that a full-cash acquisition will appear less entangled and ultimately faster to approve. Netflix meanwhile continues to push the vision of combining prestige studios with streaming power — a transformation that could reshape entertainment for the next decade.

Now the market gets to decide. Shareholders hold the remote and must choose between two radically different futures for Warner Bros. Discovery. What started as a business negotiation has morphed into a Hollywood cliffhanger — and the finale will determine which media titan writes the script for the industry’s next era.