Operational Excellence (OPEX) Daily Briefing – Friday, December 12, 2025: The $108.4B Bid That Could Rewrite Hollywood’s Future.
Điểm Tin Operational Excellence (OPEX) Mỗi Ngày – Thứ Sáu, Ngày 12/12/2025: Thương Vụ 108,4 Tỷ USD Có Thể Viết Lại Tương Lai Hollywood.
Welcome to my unique weekday article for the paid subscriber-only edition.
Operational Excellence (OPEX) Daily Briefing – issued on weekdays (Monday to Friday).
Điểm tin Operational Excellence (OPEX) hằng ngày (phát hành các ngày thứ Hai đến thứ Sáu).
This is the bilingual post in English and Vietnamese. Vietnamese is below.
Đây là bài viết song ngữ Anh-Việt. Tiếng Việt ở bên dưới.
English
PART 1 – OFFICIAL INFORMATION
In December 2025, Paramount Skydance — the newly formed entertainment company created from the merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media — officially submitted a 108.4 billion USD takeover proposal to acquire Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) through a hostile takeover. The offer came just days after Warner Bros Discovery announced that it had reached an agreement to sell its film, television, and streaming assets to Netflix for approximately 72–82.7 billion USD. Paramount immediately shocked the entire industry by presenting a significantly higher all-cash offer, priced at 30 USD per share, aiming to persuade WBD shareholders to reconsider the deal with Netflix.
According to publicly released information, Paramount Skydance asserted that its proposal provides superior value to shareholders and expressed confidence that a Paramount–WBD merger would encounter fewer antitrust risks compared with a Netflix–WBD transaction. Paramount leadership stated that combining the two conglomerates would create a global entertainment super-company, with synergistic strength across film, linear television, content production, streaming, sports, and Hollywood IP — strong enough to compete directly with Disney, Amazon, and Netflix.
The 108.4-billion-USD offer marks a new escalation in an acquisition battle that is reshaping the structure of the U.S. media industry. Initially, observers believed Netflix had “won” after announcing its agreement to buy WBD’s content assets. However, Paramount — currently undergoing a comprehensive restructuring following the merger — unexpectedly entered the race, pushing the deal far beyond expectations and opening the possibility that WBD could change ownership.
One of the most notable developments in the past week is that Paramount’s proposal is reportedly backed by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), and a major investor from Abu Dhabi. This makes the deal not only economic but also geopolitical, as Middle Eastern capital increasingly expands into global content and media. Many analysts have raised concerns about foreign influence over key American media assets such as HBO, Warner Bros Studios, DC Entertainment, CNN, and Discovery.
Despite Paramount offering a higher price, the WBD Board of Directors has not withdrawn from the initial agreement with Netflix. They are reviewing both proposals based on their fiduciary duty to shareholders and assessing factors including regulatory approval likelihood, legal obstacles, break-up fees, and financing sources. Meanwhile, both deals are under review by U.S. regulators within the antitrust framework, due to their massive potential impact on the global content market.
Industry analysts believe that if the Paramount Skydance – WBD deal succeeds, it would become one of the largest acquisitions in the history of the media and entertainment industry, potentially creating a corporation with one of the strongest content and IP portfolios in the world. This would alter the competitive balance across streaming, cable television, theatrical film, sports broadcasting, and digital content.
For global consumers, the acquisition could lead to content consolidation, fewer competitors, and renewed debates about content diversity, streaming service pricing, and user data privacy as platforms grow larger and more powerful.
The 108.4-billion-USD takeover proposal from Paramount Skydance is not only a massive transaction but a strategic move that could reshape the entire architecture of the global entertainment industry, setting the stage for a new era of competition among the world’s emerging super-content conglomerates in the decade ahead.