Netflix Shows David Zaslav the Money

Netflix is taking its Warner Bros. Discovery fight to Paramount. On the heels of a splashy Times interview last week meant to reassure skeptics of its theatrical intentions, the streaming giant has amended its bid for Warner Bros.’s streaming and studios business into an all-cash offer — one meant to counter Paramount’s hostile push to take over the company. Netflix’s ticket price that won the original bidding war for WBD still stands unchanged at $82.7 billion (or $27.75 per share), but the tweaked offer “provides enhanced certainty around the value WBD stockholders will receive at closing, eliminating market-based variability,” Netflix and WBD said in a joint statement.

One of the risks of Netflix’s earlier cash-and-stock offer was that a remainder of the final payout to shareholders could fluctuate when WBD was ultimately sold. Netflix’s change eliminates that concern and brings its bid more in line with Paramount’s $108.4 billion bid (or $30 per share), which seeks to buy not just Warner’s streaming and studios business but its declining cable assets known as Discovery Global. Netflix tweaked its offer in one other way, according to a proxy statement filed to the SEC this morning by WBD: It will reduce the debt load on Discovery Global by about $260 million, “in light of the stronger than previously anticipated 2025 cash flow performance of Discovery Global.”

Netflix is putting its money where its mouth is, in other words. The adjustment was expected after Paramount CEO David Ellison launched a hostile-takeover bid and proxy fight, suing WBD for info about how it valued the cable assets. Netflix’s amended bid landed in inboxes the morning ahead of its latest quarterly earnings report, covering the tail end of 2025, and its timing feels strategic in another way: Though any victor in this war will have to pass regulatory hurdles, WBD and Netflix’s joint statement touts a “faster path to a stockholder vote” expected by April 2026. Is it an acknowledgment that everyone’s tired of talking about this?