After Paramount submitted a higher bid – which Warner Bros. Discovery’s board deemed a “superior proposal” earlier today – Netflix has responded by announcing that it will not be raising its offer.
Netflix released a statement on its website explaining the decision. The response comes from co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters.
The CEO wrote, “The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we have always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offering, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”
After some praise for Warner Bros., which the statement called “a world-class organization”, and for its board, which ran a “fair and rigorous process”, Netflix’s bosses expressed some regret that the deal did not come to fruition. But he also explained why this is so.
‘We believe we would have been stronger stewards of Warner Bros.’ Iconic brands, and that our deal would have strengthened the entertainment industry and preserved and created more production jobs in America, but this transaction was always a ‘good to happen’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.
So far there has been no response or comment from Paramount or Warner Bros. about what happens next.
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