Dylan Byers on the Paramount/Netflix/WBD battle: personal grudges, sovereign money, and why it's not over

Summary

The battle for Warner Bros. Discovery is shaping up as one of the most consequential and personal media M&A contests in years, with David Ellison and Netflix now in open competition for an asset that will determine the structure of Hollywood for the next decade.

Dylan Byers of Puck News frames the contest through a lens his colleague Bill Cohen articulated cleanly: a company with a $400 billion valuation — Netflix — going to war with a man of equivalent personal wealth — Larry Ellison — and his son. The capital Ellison is marshalling, including Gulf sovereign wealth funds and relationships through figures like Jared Kushner, gives him a spending ceiling Netflix may ultimately be unable to match. Per Byers, if the Ellisons were willing to come in at $34–$35 per share, it would effectively be over. Netflix could not compete at that level.

David Zaslav is playing the dynamic deliberately. While Paramount's team believes Zaslav was running a rope-a-dope operation — signaling preference for their offer, then pulling Netflix into the final bidding round — Byers argues Zaslav is executing exactly what he does best: working a deal. Zaslav's initial resistance to Ellison stems partly from being offended by an opening bid in the $23.50–$24 per share range, well below the $30-plus he believed the asset could command. By keeping both parties at the table, Byers contends Zaslav has likely driven the final price above $30 per share.

The Netflix content deal announcement, including the pageantry around it, reads less like a closed transaction and more like a tactical move to pressure Ellison into a higher bid. Byers is explicit: this process is not over, and is unlikely to resolve before well into 2026. The Ellisons have already signaled, unusually, that their latest offer is not their best and final — an almost unprecedented negotiating posture.

For Ellison, the stakes are existential in strategic terms. His acquisition of Paramount was never conceived as a standalone play. The entire thesis — building a media and technology empire capable of competing with Netflix and YouTube over decades — requires scale that Paramount alone does not provide. Byers recalls being told, before the Paramount deal even closed, that WBD was always the next target. If Netflix acquires WBD instead, Ellison is left with Paramount and no clear path to the scale his strategy demands.

The UFC rights deal Ellison struck signals his willingness to overpay for strategic assets on a longer time horizon than most legacy media operators. Sports rights remain the last true content monopoly — live events that cannot be replicated or competed away by user-generated content or AI-generated video. Ellison, at 41, is thinking in decades rather than quarters, which changes his calculus on what premium is acceptable.

The personal dimension extends to Trump's desire for involvement and to the broader Hollywood creative community, which is caught between nostalgia for the theatrical model and the structural reality that the industry has already changed. Byers is dismissive of the lip service being paid to legacy: Ted Sarandos invoking Casablanca, Ellison invoking Walter Cronkite and CBS News integrity — both are, in Byers' read, performative placeholders for what both executives are actually building toward. Ellison has publicly described a future where children interact directly with characters from properties like Paw Patrol. The Disney–OpenAI deal, structured as a one-year exclusive, is an early instantiation of that vision.

Disney Plus carries just under 60 million paid subscribers in the US and Canada, and 140 million people visited Disney parks globally in 2023. The competitive moat the OpenAI partnership creates — exclusive access to Disney's IP inside Sora and ChatGPT at a moment when Gemini is pressing — could prove durable well beyond the headline $1 billion figure attached to the deal. For households already paying for Disney Plus, the ability to generate personalized content using Disney characters, available only through OpenAI's platforms, is a meaningful retention and acquisition tool. Byers, drawing on his own experience introducing his son to Sora in a second-grade class, offers that the stickiness of Disney IP combined with generative interactivity is a genuinely compelling consumer proposition — even if AI-generated content remains a small fraction of total watch hours in the near term.