Inside the Nasty Fight to Take Over Hollywood

One of the biggest dramas in Hollywood in the past year has been the fight over Warner Brothers' Discovery. Warner Brothers Discovery announced today that it is putting itself up for sale. Paramount made three bids to buy the company over the past couple of weeks here. It first, offered $19, then raised that to $22, the latest. Warner Brothers Discovery has entered exclusive negotiations to sell its film and TV studios and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix. In December, Warner announced that it had accepted Netflix's offer of $72,000,000,000. The Warner Brothers bidding saga seemed to finally come to an end. Only, Paramount still refused to take no for an answer. Tonight, a plot twist in a Hollywood blockbuster deal. Paramount Skydance is challenging Netflix with their own offer to purchase. Our colleague, Joe Flint, has been following the whole story. Netflix had a deal with Warner, but Paramount refused to throw in the towel. And they kept coming back with more offers. And even though none of these offers they were making were really moving the needle for Warner, they were making offers. They were lobbying lawmakers to argue against Netflix. That offer was the ninth one from Paramount Skydance's CEO, David Ellison. What does this tell you about how important this deal was to Paramount? This deal is almost, one could say, was a make or break for the whole Ellison strategy. And they felt that Paramount on its own didn't have the size and scale to compete with a Netflix, a Disney, all these other bigger players in the streaming wars. But if they could get Warner as well, and the Warner library, and HBO Max, and the cable networks, Paramount felt they really needed Warner to have a strong hand to go up against a Disney and a Netflix. So they really did need to have this. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, March 5. Coming up on the show, how Paramount managed to snatch a last minute victory in the fight for Warner Brothers. This episode of The Journal is presented by Intuit Enterprise Suite. If your finance team spends more time finding data than using it, if there's one entity here and one here and one here and one here, if scaling your business feels like starting over, you need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite, the AI native ERP is here from the makers of QuickBooks. Learn more at intuit.com/erp. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremfya offers self injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self inject Tremfya, proper training is required. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults …