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Warner Brothers set off a media free-for-all Tuesday. The company is dual-tracking its plan to separate cable from its Hollywood properties with a come-and-get-it pitch to rival programmers, studios, and tech companies.
Comcast has expressed interest in acquiring all or part of Warner, Semafor can confirm, complicating life for both David Zaslav and Paramount, which has lost its head start in the bidding. Who might want what, and why?
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Comcast would get little use out of Warner’s cable assets, unless it were to glom them onto its own planned channels spinoff. (That’s the Dow-DuPont two-step.) But adding Warner Bros. to Universal Pictures would create a movies juggernaut; Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings would be fodder for Comcast’s theme parks; and a combined HBO-Peacock would instantly be the second-largest streamer by subscribers.
Does Netflix, which became a content player without a legacy Hollywood studio, want one now? Co-CEO Greg Peters threw cold water on speculation recently, casting Netflix as “builders rather than buyers.”
Apple has also been M&A-shy, and is likely to direct any appetite it has to take the lead in the AI race. But it spends heavily on programming — it just shelled out $140 million for F1 rights and re-rebranded AppleTV.
Paramount is aided by Larry Ellison’s deep pockets and close ties to the White House, which has criticized Comcast’s Brian Roberts but is also friendly with Discovery’s éminence grise, John Malone. A combined Paramount-Skydance-Warner Bros.-Discovery-TikTok-Free Press is an ambitious mix of old and new media. “Social issues” (whither Zaslav?) could complicate negotiations, but the regulatory path is cleaner, in the US if not Europe.