Paramount (PARA) stock rose nearly 8% in early trading on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal According to the report, the media giant’s merger with Skydance Media is back on the table.
Shari Redstone, who controls Paramount through her family’s holding company National Amusements (NAI), ended merger talks with Skydance in June after several months of negotiations.
Under the new proposed agreement, according to the Journal, Skydance would buy National Amusements for $1.75 billion and then merge with Paramount, which owns a number of media assets including CBS, BET, Showtime and MTV, as well as its own studio business and streaming platform.
The two sides have also agreed to a 45-day “go-shop period,” which allows other potential bidders to submit proposals.
“It’s a whole lot of uncertainty,” Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Gita Ranganathan said of the new deal in an interview with Yahoo Finance. She added that its terms are “not very clear” at this point.
But what seems more clear is that Redstone would be protected from the threat of litigation from non-voting shareholders — which is the main reason the media giant called off the deal last month.
“It looks like the agreement has much stronger indemnification language this time around, which could potentially protect them from upcoming litigation,” Ranganathan said.
But that doesn’t mean things are all but settled, especially if history is any indication.
Skydance, which has previously collaborated with Paramount on the production of popular film franchises such as “Mission Impossible”, “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Transformers”, is reportedly Revise your proposal non-voting shareholders multiple times Concerns expressed Under the terms of initial discussions, Redstone was to be given $2 billion in cash as a first step in the transaction.
The negotiation mess has been a major setback for the company. Amid the drama, Paramount announced the departure of CEO Bob Bakish in late April. Alleged differences with Redstone He was criticised for his handling of the Skydance deal. He has since been replaced by an “Office of the CEO” consortium made up of the company’s three division heads.
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