Paramount CEO David Ellison has raised his offer to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, TheWrap has learned.
Ellison’s tenth bid for the entire company comes after the Warner Bros. board and Netflix agreed to reopen talks with Paramount for seven days to give them the opportunity to discuss unresolved deficiencies and clarify certain terms in its latest amended $30 per share offer.
WBD said that a senior representative from Paramount previously informed the board that it would be willing to raise its bid to $31 per share just to reopen talks, but noted that the increase wasn’t its “best and final” offer.
Terms of the latest bid could not immediately be learned, though Bloomberg reported the latest offer is an improvement over and addresses some of the concerns of its previous bids, including greater certainty over Paramount’s financing.
Representatives for WBD did not immediately return TheWrap’s request for comment, while representatives for Paramount declined to comment.
The move follows weeks of hostility between Paramount and Warner Bros. over rejecting the former’s various bids and the latter’s decision to sell its streaming and studio assets to Netflix in an $83 billion deal.
Netflix, which is offering $27.75 per share plus additional “stub equity” from the pending spinoff of Warner’s cable networks into Discovery Global, has the option of matching any offer from Paramount. A spokesperson for the streamer declined to comment.
In an effort to thwart that agreement, Paramount launched a $108.4 billion hostile takeover bid that was taken directly to WBD shareholders. As of Feb. 9, 42.3 million shares had been validly tendered to Paramount, though shareholders can withdraw their shares at any time before the offer’s deadline.
Ellison also sued Warner Bros. in January in an effort to extract more details about how the Netflix deal and Discovery Global spinoff were valued and launched a proxy fight in an attempt to sway shareholders to block the Netflix deal and require a vote to complete the Discovery Global spinoff, which is already on track for later this year. Paramount also plans to nominate its own director candidates to WBD’s board at the company’s annual meeting.
Paramount’s latest bid also comes as Netflix is facing new political and regulatory pressures, as President Trump has called on Netflix to fire board member and former UN ambassador Susan Rice or “pay the consequences.” Trump’s call over the weekend came after Rice said corporations who “bent the knee” to the administration would face consequences when Democrats return to power.
In an interview with BBC on Monday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos brushed off concerns about Rice, saying Trump “likes to do a lot of things on social media” and that approval of the deal will be decided by regulators, not the White House.
“This is a business deal. It’s not a political deal,” Sarandos added.
The Department of Justice has also issued a civil investigative demand (CID) to theater owners, filmmakers and producers amid its antitrust review of the Netflix deal.
Netflix has repeatedly maintained that it has “not been given any notice or seen any other sign that the DOJ is conducting a monopolization investigation.” It also said that any claim that it is a monopolist, or seeking to monopolize, is “unfounded.”
“Our success stems from innovation and investment that benefit consumers,” Netflix chief legal officer David Hyman said. “We neither hold monopoly power nor engage in exclusionary conduct, and we’ll gladly cooperate, as we always do, with regulators on any concerns they may have.”
Shareholders are set to vote on the Netflix deal on March 20 at 8 a.m. ET. Netflix has said it expects a deal to close within 12 to 18 months, while Paramount has argued a potential deal with Warner Bros. would close within a year.
