Paramount Is Cleared To Acquire Warner Bros Discovery

The Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission cleared Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Friday, removing the final regulatory obstacles between two of Hollywood's most storied studios and the completion of a $110 billion merger that will combine the company behind CBS, Paramount Pictures and MTV with the company behind HBO, Warner Bros., CNN and the DC superhero universe.

The deal will close in Q3 2026. The combined company does not yet have a name.

The approval arrives at the conclusion of a six-month saga that began in December 2025 when Netflix announced it would acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a proposed deal that Paramount's CEO David Ellison viewed as a threat to Hollywood's traditional studios and moved immediately to block by making a competing all-cash offer directly to WBD shareholders.

The story of how Paramount outmaneuvered Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery is one of the more dramatic corporate contests in recent media history, and it ended on February 27 when WBD's board unanimously chose Paramount's $31-per-share offer over Netflix's revised terms and signed the definitive agreement.

Friday's regulatory approval is the last piece.

The Deal That Beat Netflix

When Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery announced their merger on December 4, 2025, the assumption across the media and entertainment industry was that the combination was inevitable, two streaming giants consolidating in response to the pressure that the streaming economy was placing on both of their businesses.

Netflix had been aggressive in its content spending and subscriber growth. WBD had been struggling with the integration of Warner Bros. and Discovery following their own 2022 merger and with the debt load that integration had produced.

The Netflix-WBD deal looked like a rescue operation dressed as a strategic combination.

Paramount's David Ellison saw it differently. Four days after the Netflix-WBD announcement, Paramount filed a tender offer to acquire WBD directly, bypassing the WBD board and going straight to shareholders with a cash offer.

The pitch was simple: Netflix acquiring WBD would be anticompetitive, concentrating too much streaming content in a single company, and would damage the broader ecosystem of studios, exhibitors and content creators that had built Hollywood's global dominance.

Paramount's own acquisition would preserve that ecosystem under a combined traditional media entity that could compete with the tech giants on more equal terms.

Paramount's Chief Legal Officer Makan Delrahim testified before the House Judiciary Committee in January, calling the Netflix-WBD deal "clearly anticompetitive, and not a close call."

Paramount simultaneously solicited WBD shareholders to vote against the Netflix transaction. The pressure campaign worked. WBD's board granted Paramount a window to negotiate, determined that Paramount's revised $31-per-share all-cash offer was superior to Netflix's terms and signed the merger agreement on February 27.

What The Combined Company Looks Like

The company that will emerge from the Paramount-WBD merger is, by any conventional measure, one of the largest media enterprises in the world.

The assets on both sides of the transaction are the foundations of decades of American and global pop culture.

Paramount brings CBS, the most-watched broadcast network in the United States, Paramount Pictures, which has produced some of the most commercially successful film franchises in cinema history including Top Gun, Mission: Impossible and Transformers, Paramount+ (the streaming platform), MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET and Showtime.

The Paramount brand encompasses nearly a century of American storytelling.

Warner Bros. Discovery brings the Warner Bros. studio system, which goes back to 1923 and has produced everything from Casablanca to The Dark Knight to Harry Potter, HBO and its streaming platform Max, which carries the prestige television heritage that includes Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, The Wire and Succession, CNN and its global news operation, the Discovery family of cable channels including HGTV, TLC, Food Network and Animal Planet, the DC Studios superhero franchise, Looney Tunes, Warner Bros. theme parks and one of the most valuable music publishing libraries in the world.

The combined entity will own the rights to Harry Potter, Batman, Superman, the DC Universe, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, South Park, Yellowstone and Spongebob Squarepants, among hundreds of other valuable intellectual properties.

It will operate two major streaming platforms, Paramount+ and Max, that will likely be consolidated into a single product after the merger closes, and will control the broadcast and cable television infrastructure that still reaches the largest audiences in American media.

The CBS Context

The Paramount-WBD merger has been present, as background context, in virtually every controversy surrounding CBS News in 2026. Bari Weiss's appointment as CBS News editor-in-chief came under Paramount's Skydance leadership and was widely interpreted in connection with the company's interest in clearing regulatory hurdles, including the Trump administration's lawsuit against CBS News, which was settled earlier in 2026 under terms that critics described as editorially compromising.

The DOJ and FCC that cleared this merger on Friday are the same agencies whose alignment with the Trump administration has generated concerns about whether regulatory approvals in the current environment reflect competition policy or political calculation.

The merger was cleared. The combination will proceed. What the combined company's editorial decisions look like at CBS News and CNN, two of the most significant news operations in American television, is a question the merged entity will begin answering when the deal closes.

The Q3 2026 deadline is September 30. The deal is approved. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are becoming one company.