David Ellison Bought Paramount. Now He Wants Warner Bros. Plus, the 2025 Emmys Recap.

The Town with Matthew Belloni

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.3 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt is joined by Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw and LightShed’s Rich Greenfield to discuss the report that David Ellison is interested in making a majority-cash bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Matt, Lucas, and Rich discuss why Ellison is doing this now after just acquiring Paramount, whether a merger like this is even possible, the ramifications of the continued consolidation in Hollywood, how valuable Warner Bros. is to Ellison, and what else Ellison could buy (02:50). Later, Lucas and Matt recap the 2025 Emmy Awards, highlighting their winners and losers and, most importantly, which after-party had the best food (25:43). For a 20 percent discount on Matt’s Hollywood insider newsletter, ‘What I’m Hearing ...,’ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Email us your thoughts! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thetown@spotify.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Host: Matt Belloni Guests: Lucas Shaw and Rich Greenfield Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie Lopez Theme Song: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you care about Hollywood, and I assume you do if you're listening to the town, you should really be getting the whole story about Hollywood. That's what you get with Puck. I'm a founding partner at Puck, and I write a newsletter called What I'm Hearing. It's got exclusive news for insiders and analysis of the biggest stories. Puck has a bunch of great journalists. We just hired Kim Masters, who also covers Hollywood from the inside, plus media, sports, fashion,
0:21.7	politics, and finance. It's a must have for plugged in people. Fans of the town get a
0:26.6	discount on the description page of this episode or at puck.news slash the town. Go further into
0:32.1	Hollywood by becoming a puck member today. It is Monday, September 15th.
0:38.8	I got to say, talking to people at Emmy parties this weekend, there was yet another
0:42.9	little mini wave of distress over Hollywood.
0:45.8	All stemming from the news last week that the Ellison family is preparing a majority
0:50.1	cash bid to buy Warner Brothers Discovery.
0:53.3	The Ellison's just bought Paramount as we've been
0:55.4	chronicling, and as I've been discussing in my Puck newsletter for a while now, David Ellison
0:59.7	wants to go after Warner Brothers and it's stable of franchises, plus HBO Max and its 150 million
1:05.9	or so subscribers worldwide. If this deal happens, and it's still a big if, there's not even a
1:10.3	formal bid yet,
1:11.6	it would almost certainly mean the end of Warner's and HBO as we know them, and a questionable
1:15.9	future for yet another legacy Hollywood studio. Remember, Fox was sold to Disney and MGM was acquired
1:21.6	by Amazon. The consolidation of Warner's and Paramount in some form under one owner would be very,
1:27.3	very impactful to the business.
1:29.4	Lots of anxieties and questions here because of that.
1:32.1	Namely, why would the Ellisons want Warner Discovery?
1:34.8	Especially all those garbage cable networks when they can wait and bid just for the studio and streamer next year after they're split from the TV networks.
1:42.3	It's true that Paramount is still a subscale company competing with Netflix and Apple and Amazon and YouTube.
1:48.6	HBO and the Warner Studios would give it a lot more scale.
	...

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