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According to reports on the financial wire last night, Paramount and Skydance were about to close their merger deal.
This morning, CNBC and Variety are both reporting that Paramount has agreed on the deal and needs final approval from their major shareholder to put pen to paper. We, meanwhile, feel uniquely qualified to report on all this as we have seen all four seasons of Succession. Never missed an episode.
The reports say that a Paramount special committee agreed on the terms with David Ellison’s Skydance, and private equity muscle from RedBird Capital and KKR, with only approval from Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, needed to move forward.
Shari Redstone
Redstone is the non-executive chairwoman of Paramount Global (formerly known as ViacomCBS), president of National Amusements, and a former vice chair of CBS Corporation and Viacom.
Through National Amusements, Redstone and her family hold majority voting power over Paramount Global and its subsidiaries – CBS, Comedy Central, BET, Showtime Networks, Nickelodeon, MTV, and the film studio Paramount Pictures.
If she does agree, it would end her family’s decades-long control over the media conglomerate and its predecessor companies. Shares were trading up last night by 7.5% in anticipation of the deal.
This means they are rejecting the rival offer from Sony Pictures and Apollo Global Management. That offer was for considerably more but would have eventually led to the breaking up of Paramount, whereas this deal keeps the entity and its subsidiaries together as a media group.
The deal will also fund debt relief for Paramount.
It is not unusual for one merger to kick off a whole round of M&A activity across an entire industry as the rest of the market moves to adjust to new realities. With rumors swirling for a while around Universal, could they be next?
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