Ted Sarandos was upbeat and optimistic days after Netflix dropped its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, suggesting that Paramount’s winning offer was “irrational,” that the streamer by no means needed the legacy studio’s assets, and that Donald Trump was never going to throw his weight behind any regulatory hurdles.
Sarandos spoke at length with Bloomberg for a story published Saturday, his first interview since Netflix waved the white flag. He said Netflix had a set price at which it knew it would drop out – and Paramount simply went over it.
“We knew right away, when we got the notice on Thursday that [Paramount] had a superior offer and the details of that deal,” Sarandos told Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw. “We knew exactly what we were going to do.”
After weeks of one-upping, Paramount Skydance’s offer of $31 per share was accepted last Thursday, a surprise move that includes a breakup fee and will require David Ellison to borrow billions and massively cut costs to close the deal.
“We had a very tight range that we’d be willing to pay and made that offer back when we closed this deal,” Sarandos said. “I’m happy where we got in and happy where we got out.”
Sarandos denied that the Department of Justice’s routine investigation into the deal – or any political force – had anything to do with their decision to pull out.
“I don’t know that there was growing political resistance,” Sarandos said. “It was a growing narrative of political resistance. But we were on a normal regulatory path. … This story has been fed out for everybody, but it’s just not accurate. We were not only involved with the DOJ, we were involved with 50 regulatory bodies around the world. These things have been going exactly the way they should.”
He added that Trump “stayed completely neutral on this,” leaving it to the normal DOJ process that he believes Netflix would have cleared with ease. Sarandos said he never once considered removing Susan Rice from the Netflix board – despite Trump’s insistence she be fired – and that when it was all over, he had a glass of wine with his entire DC team.
“The truth of it is, someone was going to lose it for a dollar,” Sarandos said. “And the quicker you accepted that, the better.”
Sarandos wouldn’t speculate on whether Paramount’s deal would make it through regulatory hurdles, other than to say it “should be highly scrutinized the way I’m glad that ours was highly scrutinized.”
As for the wild speculation that Netflix was playing Paramount to scoop up a cancellation fee, Sarandos said “there are easier ways to make $2.8 billion. … We had spent a lot of time and energy. A lot of people did an incredible amount of work on this deal. … We definitely wanted this asset. We didn’t need it.”
When Shaw noted that Paramount was an “unusual other buyer,” Sarandos didn’t pull his punch: “Unusual, yeah, unusual, irrational, whatever words you want to use in that. It’ll be fascinating to see the next steps. I have been on the record a lot in the last two weeks talking about what I think the future looks like. I’m confident in our future that we’re not impacted by all that. In fact, maybe it’s to our advantage. But I hope I’m wrong for the sake of the industry.”
In spite of the fiery competition, Sarandos said Netflix will continue to buy content from both Paramount and Warner Bros. – “I can’t imagine that’s going to be a problem” – and noted that he and Ellison had just attended the Super Bowl together.
“I wish them luck.”
Read the entire Q&A over at Bloomberg.