Warner Bros. Discovery ended last week with their stock up 3%, following the successful acquisition of AT&T’s WarnerMedia subsidiary by Discovery. WBD was trading at $24.88 before markets closed for the holiday weekend. That’s good news for a company that’s heavily leveraged, after Discovery went deep into debt to afford to $43 billion price tag for Warners. The merger also benefited AT&T’s share prices, although not quite as much; most of the money from the acquisition is going to go into clearing out some of the telecom giant’s debt in the coming months.
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Among the reports that came out of the first week of Warner Bros. Discovery was word that DC could be restructured. The idea is that Warners has not been fully capitalizing on the brand’s potential.
HBO Max and Discovery Plus will be merged into a single digital platform under Warner Bros. Discovery.
It’s a busy time for Warner, who besides the Discovery merger are also reportedly in the market for a buyer for The CW, a network they co-own with Paramount, the parent company of CBS (and ComicBook.com). That sale is being blamed for the slow pace of renewals for some of The CW’s shows, including the Warner Bros.-owned DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and Batwoman, and CBS’s Charmed and Dynasty.
Founded by four brothers in 1923, Warner Bros. is a giant in the film industry, but has changed hands more time than most fans can count.
Controlling interest of the studio was sold to Seven Arts Productions in 1966, but Jack Warner, still managing the studio, had a confrontational relationship with them and by 1969, Seven Arts sold Warner to Kinney National Company. After a financial scandal tarnished the Kinney brand, they became Warner Communications in 1972. For a time, it seemed like Warner was a big dog, buying up companies like DC Comics, Six Flags, and Lorimar. In 1989, Warner merged with Time Inc., publishers of Time and Life magazines, who were almost immediately forced to buy Warner Bros. after a hostile takeover attempt by Paramount (who, funny enough, wanted Time, not Warner). In 2000, internet service provider America Online bought Time-Warner, Inc. to form AOL Time Warner, but when the dot-com bubble burst, that partnership dissolved quickly.
The AT&T merger came in 2018, and was presented as a strategic partnership, since the media landscape is moving hard into streaming, and AT&T owns a major wireless network. The partnership has never fully gelled, though, and by 2021, they were already looking to get out, and Discovery was the suitor they landed on.
