• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 3, 2026

Besides the deadline for filing taxes on April 15, the biggest red-letter day in April will be the 23rd. 

Mark your calendars. That’s the day when Warner Bros. Discovery will hold its long-awaited “special” shareholders meeting in which WBD hopes to seal the deal with Paramount with a shareholder vote.

If the vote goes WBD’s way, then the company will be bought by deep-pocketed Paramount in an all-cash deal reportedly worth an enterprise value of $110.9 billion, or $31 per share.

As everyone who has followed this story knows, this deal has traveled a circuitous route. 

Paramount first made a bid for WBD in September 2025, just a month after Skydance Media completed its deal to buy Paramount Global and then changed the name of the newly merged company to Paramount. 

But the idea of a Paramount combination with WBD had begun to percolate two years earlier, before Skydance swooped in to buy Paramount Global.

In December 2023, the news broke that Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery were discussing a merger. 

This news was the talk of the industry as 2023 came to a close. But the story soon faded early in the new year, only to be overtaken by the news that Paramount was then in negotiations to be purchased by Skydance. 

By June 2024, that proposed deal reportedly fell apart. But the following month, in July, it was back on as the two companies announced they had reached a definitive agreement for Skydance to buy Paramount Global, a deal which took a year to close.

Starting in September 2025, Paramount jousted with WBD as WBD accepted a purchase offer from Netflix that WBD characterized in December as an unbreakable, done deal.

Since then, Paramount punched away at the Netflix deal with a series of sweetened offers that WBD eventually could not refuse. 

The WBD Board turned against Netflix and Netflix withdrew.

And now, WBD is urging its shareholders to approve its takeover by Paramount.

“The WBD Board unanimously recommends shareholders vote FOR [capitalization theirs] the Paramount merger,” said a WBD press release late last month.