Such a public battle could have left everyone involved bruised. But investors seem to have decided that no one lost, rewarding all three companies. Least surprising was the 12% leap in Netflix’s stock price on news of the deal. Wall Street had thought all along that WBD was an overpriced acquisition. (Netflix would have paid $83 billion to WBD.) Investors were glad to see the streamer put aside its ambition of owning the traditional Hollywood studio. As for WBD itself, investors clearly felt Paramount was paying a decent price for the entire company. On news of the deal, WBD stock barely budged; it was almost exactly where it had been in December when the whole fray began.
Most unexpected was Paramount stock’s jump. Wall Street almost always disdains giant acquisitions on the theory that buyers get too excited about big deals and overpay—and indeed, that’s usually what happens. When the deal gets sealed, the buyer’s stock usually drops, but in this case it rose almost 30%. That’s probably because analysts were pleasantly surprised: They had figured Paramount would need to raise its offer from $30 to $32–$34 a share to vanquish Netflix; instead, Paramount offered just $31 and prevailed.
But despite the upbeat mood on Wall Street, every big deal includes losers. And this is no exception: Assuming it goes through, the losers in this deal will be Hollywood’s unseen entertainment workers—the writers, non-star actors, directors, set designers, and others, whose numbers have been decreasing for years.
In 2022 Los Angeles County had 145,000 workers in the motion picture industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, it was 104,000. One reason is decades of consolidation—deals like this one, most of them involving layoffs. When Paramount merged with Skydance last year, it laid off about 15% of its workforce, about 2,600 employees.
Closing the acquisition of Warner is expected to take at least nine months as regulators examine the deal. If and when the purchase happens, Paramount has said it will find $6 billion of “cost synergies.”
“Merger after merger in the media industry has harmed workers, diminished competition and free speech, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars better invested in organic growth,” said the WGA.
