Paramount boosts Warner Bros offer to rival Netflix in takeover bid

Paramount boosts Warner Bros offer to rival Netflix in takeover bid 7 hours ago Share Save Natalie Sherman Business reporter Share Save Paramount Skydance has boosted its proposal to buy Warner Bros Discovery, with an offer that could finally knock rival Netflix out of the game. Warner Bros, which put itself up for sale last year, said Paramount had agreed to increase its purchase offer by $1 per share, creating a bid that its board had determined "could reasonably be expected to lead to a ... superior proposal". Warner Bros said it would engage in further talks before making a final decision about whether to abandon the deal it struck with Netflix in December. Netflix, which would have four days to make a counter-offer, did not immediately comment. In a recent interview with the BBC , Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos declined to say whether the company was prepared to engage in a bidding war, calling the back-and-forth "part of the process". "I don't want to do hypotheticals," he said, before the new Paramount bid was made. "We very much like the deal where we're at right now, we're very disciplined buyers and we always have been." "This is all a process of price-discovery," he added later. Paramount, which is backed by tech billionaire Larry Ellison and led by his son David, has waged an outspoken campaign to buy Warner Bros since last year as it looks to transform itself into a Hollywood heavyweight. But Warner Bros has so far spurned Paramount's offers . Instead, in December it said it had agreed to sell its film and streaming divisions, including HBO, to Netflix in a deal worth $27.75 per share or roughly $82bn (£61bn), including debt. Warner Bros said it would spin-off the remainder of its business, including traditional television networks and the news channel CNN, as an independent company. After getting rejected, Paramount has sweetened its original proposal, which called for paying $30 per share to take over the entire company. But this is the first...