Paramount Skydance put $110.9 billion on the table on February 24, 2026, for all of Warner Bros. Discovery. The acquisition agreement was confirmed three days later, and the deal closed on October 6, 2026. Paramount Skydance was then restructured and renamed Skydance, and its stock moved to the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “SKYD”.
The figure that matters is what the offer beat. Netflix had won the earlier bidding in December 2025 with an $82.7 billion offer for the Streaming & Studios business alone. Paramount’s bid covered the whole company, cable networks included.
From spin-off plan to auction
In June 2025, Warner Bros. Discovery said it would spin off its less profitable Global Linear Networks division, debt and all, and keep Streaming & Studios. On October 21, 2025, it reversed course and put itself up for sale. Paramount Skydance, Comcast and Netflix all bid.
How the company got here
The company itself was only a few years old. AT&T and Discovery announced on May 17, 2021, that AT&T would spin off WarnerMedia to its shareholders and merge it with Discovery, Inc. The structure was a Reverse Morris Trust. AT&T shareholders would hold 71% of the new company and Discovery shareholders 29%, and AT&T was to receive $43 billion in cash and debt. The merger was completed on April 8, 2022.
David Zaslav’s team promised $3 billion in cost savings. Early moves included shutting CNN’s streaming service CNN+ on April 21, 2022, two weeks after the merger closed. In the second quarter of 2022 the company reported $9.8 billion in revenue and a pro forma net loss of $2.2 billion, driven by integration and restructuring costs, plus $825 million in write-offs on content impairments and development.
The assets came from long histories. Warner Bros. was founded on April 4, 1923, by four brothers, Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner, and is one of the “Big Five” American film studios. Kinney National Company reincorporated as Warner Communications in 1972, which merged with Time Inc. in 1990 to become Time Warner. Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting System in 1996 and merged with AOL in 2001, a deal that went badly enough that the company went back to its old name in 2003.
In 2018, Discovery Communications bought Scripps Networks Interactive and became Discovery, Inc., while AT&T acquired Time Warner and turned it into WarnerMedia. Those two companies are the ones that combined in 2022.
