Emergency Pod! Paramount Outbids Netflix and Wins Warner Bros.

Don't miss the movie critics are raving is epic and exciting and gorgeous and heartbreaking

“and stands as one of the greatest films ever made.”

It's got incredible visuals, jaw-dropping action, and a cinematic achievement.

Avatar Fire and Ash now playing in theaters and now nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Costume Design. It is Friday, February 27th. It's official! We have a winner in the Battle for Warner Brothers and it's Paramount.

Quite a stunner, not that the Ellison ended up on top, or that they ultimately agreed to a deal worth $111 billion. I've actually been predicting the Ellison since the beginning of the auction for Warner Brothers studio and HBO Max and CNN last fall. In after Netflix closed its $83 billion deal for the studio and streamer in December.

But still, the way it went down, pretty surprising. Earlier this week, Paramount finally raised its bid from $30 a share for the whole company,

“$231, plus the Ellison's agreed to a bunch of additional sweeteners on top of the breakup”

fees and Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, he agreed to backstop the deal if it falls through. It was all enough for the Warner Brothers Discovery Board to declare the Paramount bid called Superior, which then gave Netflix four days to submit a matching bid, which most of us expected them to do, given how aggressive Netflix has been fighting for their deal.

But nope, Ted Serrano's and Greg Peters, the co-CEOs, they walked almost immediately. Ted was actually in DC, according to the Justice Department when this all went down.

We've always been disciplined, he wrote this statement, "At the price required to match Paramount

Skydance's latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive." Of course, there was a political cloud hovering over all of this, especially Netflix's ability to close this deal amid anti-trust scrutiny, but discussed that with Ted on the show last week. The Trump administration is pretty happy with how the Ellison's are managing Paramount,

and in particular CBS news, David Ellison was all smiles doing the thumbs up with Lindsey Graham at the State of the Union on Tuesday. So how did this happen? Was it just that Paramount was willing to dramatically overpay to the extent Netflix was not?

After all, the Netflix shareholder didn't like this deal, the stock has been in decline ever since they started talking about buying Warner's, and it's shot up when Paramount got the deal. Or was this pre-ordained by Trump? And most importantly, what comes next, regulators are still going to take a close look

here, and David Zazlov, he said on a town hall this morning that this deal could not close still, and if it does, it will likely take six to 12 months. And then the aftermath, and all likelihood, two studios are about to get smashed together. Cannot be good for Hollywood in general, pretty disastrous, actually. So today it's an emergency pod with our usual Monday guy, Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg.

Paramount wins Warner Brothers, now what? From the ringer and puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is the town. Okay, we are here, emergency pod time, Lucas is at home dealing with five other things I am in Arizona, going to some spring training games, Dodger's Central, but we are convening

here because finally we have a winner in the sweepstakes for Warner Brothers and its paramount.

Just like I said, it would be not quite how I thought it would go down, because I assume you were also surprised by this. I was surprised by the speed with which Netflix retreated, but not the more I thought about it. I wasn't, because over the last week there had been this sort of creeping feeling that Warner Brothers was going to go with Paramount and that Netflix, like I thought,

I thought that the whole Cerando's PR tour, to me, even though it was like in theory offensive,

“I interpreted as a little defensive and I started, like he saw where it was going, right?”

And they had lost the war in public, the war of public opinion, and was frustrated by it and wanted to try to counter the narrative, and it ended up being too little too late. Yeah, I mean, well, there's the public narrative, and then there's the political narrative, which I think was turning, they are, of course, but listen, how long have we been talking

about this being an era of consolidation in media to fight big tech, you know, Disney Bot Fox, Amazon Bot MGM, now Paramount is buying Warner Brothers, so you know, big picture, this is not a huge surprise, this is happening, but the ramifications are, it absolutely enormous here. And I don't think people in Hollywood quite realize what is about to happen.

So we're going to go into a bunch of different topics. First, we're going to go into why this happened. So give me your sense of why this went south for Netflix, why Paramount beat this down and took this, and essentially swipe it away from a closed deal. I think there are a bunch of factors, look, Paramount was relentless.

problems that the Warner Brothers board had. Have Larry Ellison back this personally, okay, he did, have a breakup fee.

Yeah, I mean, they end up with a deal where they are going to have to pay Netflix $2.8 billion

go away. They have to commit $7 billion if this deal falls apart because of court case regulatory scrutiny, all of that. Larry Ellison is largely backstopping 111 billion dollar deal. Paramount can't change the terms are backed out if their business falls apart.

If Warner Brothers business falls apart because remember, both these companies make basically all their money from cable networks that are shrinking every year. And so that really helped Paramount. And then there was the political pressure that they created where they kept talking about what a bad deal.

The Netflix kind of arrangement was, they got folks in Europe energized, they got attorneys. General energized the Senate, people in the White House, and even though Netflix and Warner

“Brothers dismissed it all as noise where it really, I think, had an impact was on Warner”

Brothers shareholders. You started to say, "Wait, why are we doing this Netflix deal?" And Paramount is going to buy the whole company and they're probably going to get it approved. And then the wrinkle on the Netflix side is their shareholders didn't like the deal.

And so it's certainly the big one there. I think that pressure, if the Netflix stock had started going up on the prospect of buying Warner Brothers, it's a different ball game. But the Netflix stock was down, what, 30, 35% and it kept going up every time the Paramount people would make a new deal because the shareholders were so hopeful that this wouldn't

happen for Netflix. Like, that's got to make an impact on them. Yeah. Netflix's market cap over the course of this process went down by more than they were offering to pay for the assets from Paramount, which is pretty crazy.

And Ted argued throughout the process that they've done a lot of things that the shareholders didn't like, and this was all just uncertainty, and you know, when they added ads, people were upset.

“But I think this is different because this was a fundamental change of what the company”

had done for the entirety of its existence. They just didn't do deals like this. And people were asking, like, why are you going about trying to buy this traditional media asset when you're kicking everybody's assets streaming? And are you going to get caught in a bidding war, which would have happened again this

week? Where you're going to spend too much money, you're going to take on all this debt. And if you're a shareholder, it also means, oh, you're not going to be doing buybacks anymore. That's not as lucrative for us. So yeah, I think they ran into a real problem with their shareholders that the political

situation only made even worse.

And look, I think Netflix got really frustrated at the end that basically nobody was on their

side. You know what, though? I think that the Ted Press Tour did start to convince people around town. They started to say, oh, you know, maybe they will keep Warner Brothers separate, maybe they will commit to movie theaters, you know, maybe the alternative here of CBS and the

Barry Weiss nonsense coming to CNN and all the cost cutting in the layoffs. Maybe that's not what we should be rooting for here. I do. I felt like the tide was turning a little, at least within the Hollywood community, certainly not on the political end.

I had felt that earlier, right? Where initially the deal gets announced and the Hollywood response was, oh, my god, this is horrible. How could we allow this to happen? And I felt like over the course of the next, you know, weaker two people started to think

about it. And they're like, well, if this is going to happen, maybe Netflix is actually better than Paramount and we don't love it.

But like, you know, let's try to basically, let's try to get what we can out of Netflix

on theaters and all that. And Ted, after initially slipping up on some of the messaging, became very consistent, said the same thing. So again, on theaters, you could not say it anymore clearly than he did. Yeah, I would bullet point by bullet point with them and literally got him to commit to

things like marketing and, you know, all this stuff that he was, was happy to do. You know, there was not a James Cameron who came out and said, I'm behind these people. Like, yeah, we should, we should go with this. But it's easier to pick holes at the deal that has been made, the Netflix deal, then

“pick holes in the deal in the case of Paramount that was a theoretical deal, right?”

He spent all this time arguing about movie theaters, which was one of the central concerns about the Netflix deal and spent very little time arguing about the billions of dollars and cuts that Paramount is about to make because that deal wasn't on the table at the time. Exactly.

And now, I think the realization hit people in town last night because I'm sure your text and emails are blowing up like mine, like, holy shit, this is catastrophic. You know, as my entire department going to be gone, what is going to happen to CNN? What is going to happen to not not the creative team necessarily at Warner Brothers, maybe they'll keep them to pick the movies, but everybody else, all of the apparatus that

goes into making and marketing and distributing and exploiting movies, all those people are on the table now. Yes, I think my favorite was, I thought I'd be happy, but now I'm scared.

is that going to look like, I mean, maybe yeah, you, I think it'd be as denying to get rid

of Casey Boyz and his creative team at HBO and already the Paramount people are saying that they're not going to do that. But again, it's everybody else, let's walk through that, okay, Casey is obligated contractually to report to the CEO of the company.

“So are they going to keep HBO separate and have Casey report in to David, David Ellison?”

I would guess. Yes. So I don't believe he would report to Cindy Holley, not going to happen. So they will have Casey and Cindy running parallel organizations for parallel streaming services. Yeah, why not?

You do what you got to do to keep people. That's not what's, that's not usually what you do. That's not what you do. But it's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do.

That's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do.

That's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do. That's not usually what you do.

That's not usually what you do. The overarching truth here is that there are going to be massive, massive cuts.

“I think the movie lots are on the table.”

Will Ellison sell off the Warner Brothers lot to develop it for condos? Will he sell the paramount lot? Will he sell both of them? I mean, all of this is on the table. It's pretty catastrophic for the industry.

In the short term, at least he's arguing that he's going to create a behemoth that can finally take on Netflix. In the long haul, it'll be a growth mode company, but that's a big big ask. It gets to this question, can this deal close? Probably, right?

I don't know, man, you look, Rob Bonta, the Attorney General of California is already putting out statements saying, this is not a done deal. We are looking hard at this. The other state attorneys general in liberal states are going to go hard against this. The European regulators are going to go hard against this.

There was a report from TD Cowan this morning that said, they are pretty confident that this can close. They cited the Sprint deal from 2019, where a lot of the Attorney General opposed that. And there were some concessions made.

And ultimately, the Department of Justice signing off on it was dispositive and they got

that deal. There was a Sprint team-oval deal. I really do think that this is going to be a challenge. This is not over. The paramount people don't agree with this, but like normal antitrust measurements, the

paramount deal is actually like the one that would get blocked because it is a personal merger. Combining a bunch of duplicate of assets, direct competitors. But we haven't really seen the Trump administration come out and try to block any of this. Which is why I don't think that this one would, I don't think the Netflix deal would have

gotten blocked. I do think it would have wound up in court for a year or two. I don't think that this deal would get blocked. I don't think the Department of Justice is the problem.

“I honestly do think that's where the politics comes into play.”

You think they'll see either attorneys general or Europe, basically.

And because Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker already told us that I know they don't, but you could have said the same thing on the other side. And that nonsense, hearing in DC with Ted Seranos, that did impact the public opinion on this. And if this is now become something bigger than just a corporate deal, bigger than Hollywood

bigger than media, this is now something that like regular people know about. And if this is a cause to live in the Democratic political apparatus, we've got to protect CNN, we've got to protect the media, we've got to protect your data and all of this stuff that the Ellison family, Trump donors, watch her suck up and turn into this big media behemoth.

This could be a problem for them. I think you mentioned Rob on to from California already said that they were going to review this closely. Europe has generally expressed concerns about media consolidation and kind of American hegemony.

I think Europe probably would have been more alarmed by Netflix than then paramount. Other than the fact that paramount is, in fact, buying a bunch of the European TV network assets, which makes it a little more complicated. But I think it'll be a slog, I think they'll probably need to pay some of those tickers that they pledged for how long it goes and their concessions that they

could make. I mean, this is the same thing that was true on the Netflix side, and you paramount could say, we agreed that we won't do XYZ and okay, that's enough for the California Attorney General. Okay, we will do XYZ.

That's enough for the New York Attorney General, something like that. We will continue to produce a lot of stuff in the U.S. Oh, by the way, we will continue to sell many of our most popular shows to Netflix, which I do think is going to happen. I want to get it to go back to that question of the consolidation and really the power

of the Ellison-owned platform. Now, let's assume this deal goes through. I don't think people really realize what this deal will create.

subscribers on streaming. They will have dozens of linear platforms and television networks. They will have CNN, they will have CBS news, they will have 2 of the original 5, 6 movie studios. They will have a pretty unprecedented amount of the traditional entertainment assets.

Now, take out this Apple Amazon Netflix. This will be a pretty dominant platform. How do we think for more-- They'll account between CBS and Paramount and Warner Bros. They'll account for more production than any entity on the planet.

“How do we think Ellison is going to use this platform?”

His argument has always been that if we're allowed to do this deal, there will be synergies

and there will be additive elements here that are going to make the linear business work for us and allow us to create this direct consumer platform that is going to be best in class and better than Netflix. I still haven't fully bought into their argument for why this is better overall other than just a consolidation play.

But then you can think about why would you see that because we've seen these deals happen again and again and again and we yet have a successful example of one of these mega mergers that have had the intended effect and would be looked back upon as a positive. We heard these same arguments for Warner and Discovery or it's not that different from Disney Fox.

Disney Fox, what Disney Fox was probably a little smaller than what Paramount is buying from

Warner Brothers but Disney and much larger company than Paramount.

And Fox, the Fox network was not part of the Disney transaction and Warner doesn't have a broadcast network as well. So that's one thing. But the power of these sports assets, the Ellison now have football, USC, Gulf, March Madness, they own all of March Madness now, like they can deploy those assets across all of these

platforms and potentially save those linear networks longer than would have been saved under

“the Warner regime because what if you start putting USC on TBS or TNT, which I believe they”

can do? What if you start using this to, I just think that having all of this, having all of these different kind of levers of audience can prolong the linear business a little bit longer. It's not the same as Discovery and Warner Brothers but we keep having these media companies that because of the decline of cable are sort of worried about their future and believe

that they're going to, they will ultimately fail if they don't get bigger.

And so you just keep having smaller companies, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing. So yes, Paramount is in a much stronger position having the assets of Warner Brothers Discovery under its foot than not, right? Just having David Ellison's firepower, the Ellison's firepower behind Paramount may not have been enough.

They have a bunch of cable networks that are just not going to get turned around. So it was really all about what they could do in streaming. I don't ultimately think that this is really about necessarily like prolonging or strengthening linear, what linear gives the Ellison's is a bunch of cash flow. They do need it to continue because the numbers on the declines are pretty scary.

They need it to continue because they need to use that cash flow to invest in streaming and to pay down their debt, right? And so, and the Warner Brothers Discovery networks are more profitable than the Paramount networks because David's that's like been spend a lot of money. It's a bunch of low cost reality programming for the most part.

And the Paramount networks are just not as strong a brand and they've been neglected for so long. Well, they were. They were used skewing to begin with like MTV and BH1 and like they just were in the worst possible position for a digital disruption.

“I think the most interesting question at least from like, what is the combined company”

mean or do is like, we'd been hearing forever about like, oh, these different streaming services, all they need to do is join forces and then they can keep up at Netflix, right? David does, I was talking all about we got a bundling HBO Max with Disney Plus and peacock and Paramount Plus and you just need to put it all together. Now we're going to see, right?

A company is going to have HBO Max and Paramount Plus and the same thing, they can choose to combine it and make it one. They can choose to sell it as a package deal. This is the shot. If you think that this is going to make you competitive with Netflix, like, you now have

the resources. You have two studios. You have a lot of programming. You have HBO.

All this brand.

“Before, can you, is that really what you needed in order to be a suitable rival to Netflix”

and YouTube and Amazon and Disney? Yes. Now to mention the debt question because I was looking at these numbers last time, my partner Park Bill Cohen. I did a back and forth last night on this if you can read that at Park.

He went through the debt issue and we're talking about $70 billion of net debt for this

company and that's an estimate, but the revenue and profit associated with this company does not support that level of debt, at least not in the short term. Are we just getting into another Warner Discovery situation here where the focus for the next five years is going to be on paying down this debt and doing whatever possible they can to loosen the reins of this debt?

That's going to be a huge part of it. I mean, but it doesn't just equal cuts and layoffs rather than investment. David Ellison has been talking about how he's the one that's going to invest in this company and they are going to be able to put two and two together and make five. But the history of this Warner Discovery Transaction tells us that that's not what happens.

They just have to cut and cut and cut to pay down debt. Well, this is why I said when I said earlier, the history of all these transactions is that

they talk about how great it'll be for the industry, but then they just end up firing

a bunch of people and cutting costs. Now again, David Ellison has said we're going to put 30 movies here and theaters, we're going to invest more in production. We all would like to believe it, right? We want that to be the case because it's what the industry could use.

The history of M&A suggests otherwise you don't usually combine the same assets to spend more money. You do it to save money, especially if you have debt and they've already talked about having billions of dollars in synergy. So yes, you're going to see thousands of people lose their jobs and we'll see what the

impact is on output, right, you know, we'll see how many movies combine Warner Brothers and Paramounts produce in three years. We'll see how many television shows combine their studios release. We'll see what the investment is in the streaming services. My assumption is that they'll be able to spread that programming across their networks

in their streaming services and something that may be strategically very good for them, but not lead to an increase in output.

“Do we think Taylor Sheridan regrets failing on Paramount for universal?”

No. Good to have HBO show. Cut up. I guess I don't think he regrets it, but will there be a talent drain? Listen, this the Republican cloud over the elections now, I mean, they went all in.

There's that picture of David Ellison doing the thumbs up with Lindsey Graham that may come back to haunt him if he starts getting the impression that this is the new fox and that some creators do not want to work for Faust. I don't know, I mean, the Rupert Murdoch is pretty darn successful. He was and throughout his ownership of Fox News and the movie studio, it didn't really

seem to hurt this creative output. People like Seth and Farland and Steve Levittan and other creators who have spoken out against Fox News continue to make shows for Fox. Yeah, and I also feel like if he came, I mean, we're in a different era. That became more of an issue in the Trump era than it was when George Bush was president

or Barack Obama was president, you know, people didn't necessarily like the Murdoch's politics and Hollywood, but they held their nose and they worked with him and look, Fox television made a lot of great shows, the TV studio, the movie studio, they worked with top tier filmmakers. Jim Cameron had no problem working for Murdoch.

I mean, Jim Cameron was that the number one defender, David Ellison in this the only thing from a Hollywood perspective, yeah, it's amazing. Now CNN people, that's another one. I mean, CBS News has already had problems recruiting people and I think that only gets worse. I mean, just the amount of cutting that is about to happen at CNN is going to be pretty

extraordinary. I think, well, if you're one of those on air hosts at CNN, you're probably feeling the squeeze right now. Oh, and forget that, I mean, all these bureaus around the world that it duplicative with CBS news and CNN, like all of that is going to be combined.

How much do you think David Ellison thinks about the news business?

I think he thinks about the bottom line and where he can cut and he looks at these two very

expensive news operations and says, you know, it's going to get ridiculousness, right? Like they're going to start treating CNN, like the former Viacom people treated their cable networks. What can we cut to the absolute bone to continue to get our carriage fees and our advertising to just right.

“And then it's going to be $20 per hour today exactly that's what it's going to be.”

You run Stanley Tucci, you run town halls, you run, you know, the repeat of the nightly programs all night, like it's just going to be cuts and, you know, what it's probably, I hate to say this, but it's probably in the short term, the better business move because you just extract all the carriage fees and ads.

That's the truth. Yeah. You're down. So like, it probably can't get much worse. So if you're not going to invest and you're not going to put in a strategy to try to

“take on MSNBC or MSNL in Fox, then what are you going to do there?”

If they wanted to, this wouldn't, and they do this deal, they would now have the ability to do something that Paramount couldn't do, which is they could spin off a bunch of cable networks or find a buyer for them. Yeah. Either one.

Just say we walked. They say they're not going to do that. But remember when they put it out there that they wanted people to pitch them ideas to reinvent MTV and other networks, that doesn't happen yet. Nobody has bought it.

Yet. No. There may be, I know. There are people that have ideas and they have money, but we'll see if that ends up happening.

Allison has always been so loyal to his people, where we talked about HBO.

We didn't really talk about the studios, but whether Mike and Pam, Warner Brothers, survive this, you know, Mike and Pam, Channing, yeah, I mean, I think not, I don't think they're going to go in and just like outright fire everybody to start.

“I think every indication that I have had is that they're going to give people a chance and”

see if they can work with the new regime. I don't know whether these people will report into the Paramount Studio team or whether they will be a separate entity, like I think will happen with HBO. My guess is that they will have to report into the Paramount people and Warner's will become a division there.

But I don't, I don't think all of a sudden, if you really want to increase the output of movies, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to get rid of the people who are producing and making those movies at Warner's, at least the creative executive, the thing, everybody else, business affairs, legal, marketing, all of that. I think that gets consolidated, but the creative teams, I think, will stay in the short

term. Do you agree? Depends on short, I mean, this would be agree that this deal isn't going to even get approved until Paramount hopes by the fall, but let's say early next year, then they have to integrate.

These things always tend to take a couple of years.

I think the real question is like, OK, when they've actually gotten in there and started to move things around, even when Richard Plepler, the head of HBO last after the AT&T deal, it took a two or three years for that to happen. Yeah, true. By the way, if the legislature turns blue this fall, and we have a Democratic-led house

or Senate even, does that impact this? Does the hammer fall on all Trump-aligned media? Well, they don't, again, they don't have oversight.

“They don't, but they have loud voices, right, but I think the loud voices mattered more when”

there was a competitive process, right? When you could get shareholders to say, oh, like the sentiment is on the side of Paramount, we should go with that. If the shareholders have approved the deal, those voices matter a little bit less. Yeah.

All right. Final two questions. Who are the big winners here? As you know, this is the podcast that cares mostly about winning losers. Not just that, but we care mostly about how much money David Zazloff makes in a year.

So obviously, he's a big winner. The Warner Stock was trading around $7 a share last fall, then Paramount comes along. Zazloff needs to send Allison some kind of a nice, nice-looking Hawaiian couch for his Lenni house or something, because this is all happening because the Paramount people emerged as aggressive buyers who wanted this at any cost, and then they got Netflix involved and

then that's all you need. So $7 last fall, the initial Paramount offer was $19 a share. Nobody thought it could go to $30, 10 offers later, it closed at $31. So obviously, David Zazloff, okay, so if David Zazloff is the biggest winner, who do we think is the biggest loser?

Well, it's not Ted. It's not Ted Serendos. I mean, no, obviously, he didn't get the asset, but he's getting all of these, this breakup fee, his shareholder's love that didn't get his perception is that they won by losing, right? Yeah.

So because this morning, if there was a reputational damage to Ted and I said I didn't

think so, I don't think so either, because he never said anything that was going to come

back to hunt him. I don't think, except for the theater's thing, I mean, I joke last night that it's going to take a week or two for him to go back to trashing theaters, which may happen. But I don't think he said anything during this whole process that people are going to be like, well, wow, we can't work with them anymore.

Or wow, this company is so weakened now that they're going to, it's going to be a downward spiral or can they compete with all these other competitors now as just a streaming company. I don't think he did anything. So I think that is still a winner here. The losers are probably the employees, right?

Just because of how many more job cuts there and how it would in general, the Los Angeles economy, the economy of New York and Atlanta, we're seeing an end is based. Like that's the biggest loser here. If I were a city leader in LA or New York, it would concern me that thousands of my constituents are about to lose their job.

Classic good for the shareholders, not so good for the employees, exactly. Just a final question, what should Netflix use the two billion dollar breakup fee to

Craig's voting for the Saudis as the big winners, by the way, Craig's a big Saudi guy.

The Middle Eastern money, the Middle Eastern money that Paramount has here. I mean, they won't do it. Netflix should buy the Paramount lot. Great idea Craig, great idea. I agree, because Ted has coveted a lot for a long time.

The problem with that one is there's no way David Ellison would sell it to you. Why? I have, from the beginning, I had heard that Larry thought of this whole deal as a real estate deal, you know, and that he would be able to get billions of dollars in selling these lots.

I mean, there's there are historical designation, at least on the Paramount lot, I'm not sure about winners, but yeah, Ted is one of this lot. There are already based in Hollywood, Netflix.

“So why not just sell him the Paramount lot and then move everyone to warn you?”

We can run through the fun things that Netflix could do, but what do you like? Sure, your colleague Eric Gardner's idea about investing in a news division to take on

CNN CBS will never happen, but it would be interesting.

No, but it's just fun to think about. Yeah. I think another one, it wouldn't be enough for the full deal, but just for if they really wanted to do it for shits and giggles to get back a Paramount would be to go and take the CBS NFL package.

Of course, that just stealing NFL from Paramount would be the ultimate FU. Just like, okay, guys, this is the big time you want to, you want to play with us? You want the money for this. We're now going to, you know, we're now going to be able to outbid you for this because we can spend anything we want.

Again, we're now going to get the right to again, jack them up to where, you know, Paramount has to double what it pays for NFL. You know, you don't think that's going to happen. I think they're going to take the money, they're going to put it into their podcast. They could buy a movie theater chain.

They could. I don't think that's going to happen. Ted Serena's the defender of movie theaters now. Maybe take your money and buy it. Someone, someone we both know made a suggestion, I mean, this was when they were trying

to win the deal.

But if they wanted to, that Netflix should just commit, like, investing $500 million

in refurbishing movie theaters and it would change the narrative around that. But why would they do that? I'm just passing along straight. Yeah, that is the ultimate Hollywood wishful thinking. They should buy the arc light in L.N.

That would win them so much. You'd buy the center of Ramadan, but they already have the Egyptian, like, two blocks away. It's all for show anyways. It's not like they actually make money on the Egyptian.

So just buy it and everyone would love you and have your premieres there. Can I ask you a question to close this up here? Yeah, please, Greg. Finish this off here.

“If Netflix got more and more others, where was it on the Defcon scale?”

And what is it now that Paramount's going to get more and more others? Defcon 1 is the most dire and Defcon 5 is the least dire. I think Paramount is, like, a two. And Netflix would have been, like, a three or a four. No.

Do disagree? I think that Paramount is a one in Netflix with a two. I think they're both like, wow, Lucas is more cynical than me. I think they're both very alarming to everyone. Yeah.

Okay, especially because we've been through the Disney Fox of it all. And we now have had, like, five years to see what happened. Yep. All right. Maybe you're convincing me.

I should be more cynical. All right, Lucas. Thanks for joining. Thanks, Matt. Okay, Nikola.

Chris Fraude.

“How much money do you have or do you have?”

What brings us more? Moment. I checked the code. Oh, huh. How much is it?

Bring it up to 150 euros per year. Yeah, right. But why do you know what? Why? How do you show the start of life?

That's just the story of everything. Yeah, I'm asking you. Twenty-four-seven and unbeamable German, that's just the one who understands us. You're right. Say.

You're right. Now you can try it out. As you can see, you've got a lot to tell us. You've got a lot to tell us. Stop.

Let's take a look at the recording. With Stepstown All-Jobs, we'll show you all the time for one year. In one package, we have a fixed price. So let's take a closer look at the cost of 50% of the cost. We have a flexible time.

Now let's take a look at Stepstown. The E/All-Jobs. Stepstown. the real talent to find for all jobs.