Everything you need to know about the Warner Bros. sale (so far)
The Business
KCRW
4.5 • 699 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With Netflix’s bombshell move to acquire Warner Bros. still reverberating through the town, Paramount has gone fully hostile–bypassing Warner leadership and taking its case straight to shareholders. Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw break down the latest maneuvering in a saga that seems to sprout new twists by the day.
Also, with Kim Masters sidelined by a bug this week, Belloni presents a few bonus stories from Masters's recent conversations: Wake Up Dead Man writer-director Rian Johnson and producer Ram Bergman talk about the green room they devised for the first Knives Out–a space that became so essential to the ensemble’s chemistry that trailers sat mostly empty. And Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy explains why, despite the runaway success of Deadpool & Wolverine, he’s not sprinting toward a sequel just yet.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, I'm Matt Bellany, filling in for Kim Masters, who's fighting a bug that made |
| 0:04.0 | her lose her voice. Imagine that. She'll be back soon, but meanwhile, we'll share some |
| 0:08.7 | tasty leftovers from her chat with Stranger Things executive producer Sean Levy, |
| 0:12.9 | and from her interview with Wake Up Dead Man writer-director Ryan Johnson and his producing |
| 0:17.0 | partner, Ron Bergman. Every time I have a bet with the line producer, because we have to provide traders for all those actors, right? And it costs a lot of money. And I'm saying, we are wasting all this money because none of those actors are ever going to be in their trailer. They're just going to hang together. And every time you say, see? But first we banter. Stick around. It's the business from KCRW. |
| 0:39.9 | I am joined by Lucas Shaw, head of the Media and Entertainment Group at Bloomberg. |
| 0:43.7 | Welcome, Lucas. |
| 0:44.6 | Great to be here. |
| 0:45.8 | Okay. |
| 0:46.2 | So pretty big week in the media and entertainment industry. |
| 0:51.0 | I want to do a little recap of just the insanity that has unfolded since last week |
| 0:57.5 | when all of a sudden, most of us thought that Warner Brothers was going to be sold to |
| 1:02.7 | Paramount and the Ellison family. We got reporting from you, and then the next morning, we got |
| 1:08.1 | a press release announcing that Netflix had won this deal. |
| 1:12.2 | They agreed to pay about $27.75 per share. That's a combination of cash and about four and something |
| 1:22.2 | change in Netflix stock. The Ellison family that owns Paramount, they were not too happy about this. |
| 1:29.1 | They immediately started complaining that the Netflix deal was not the best deal for the shareholders. |
| 1:36.2 | And we saw on Monday that Paramount decided to go hostile, which means they are going directly to |
| 1:43.1 | shareholders. They submitted a letter saying that |
| 1:46.5 | their bid of $30 per share, which when you include the debt of the company, gets up over |
| 1:52.3 | $100 billion for this company. They believe it's a better bid. They believe that they are the |
| 1:58.5 | better owners. And they believe that they have a path to getting this deal approved by regulators. They believe that they are the better owners, and they believe that they have a path |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KCRW, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of KCRW and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.