Look at the biggest recent mergers and acquisitions in the worlds of entertainment, media and sports, from the record-setting $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts to the Skydance-Paramount merger and the dueling offers for Warner Bros. Discovery, and you’ll notice the same handful of names showing up again and again, often together in the same deal. They’re investment firms with names like RedBird Capital Partners, the Raine Group, LionTree Advisors and Silver Lake. Most provide financing for these huge transactions, while others, like Moelis & Company, are pure advisors who help structure and execute capital raises.
If you don’t work in or near the gilded trenches of high finance, you might be asking yourself, “What the hell is going on?”
“When you’re dealing with artists and film and music, it is as relationship-driven as I’ve ever seen,” explains Angelo Rufino, who, as head of special situations at the 41-year-old Bain Capital, works in the same sectors and spirit as those younger companies. “It is really important who you are, what you can add and bring to the table. I think at times that can be lost with the bigger firms.”
Once upon a time, corporate M&A was dominated by decades- and, in some cases, century-and-a-half-old Wall Street behemoths that controlled trillions in assets. Then came the 2008 financial crisis, triggering massive losses that pushed some to the brink of ruin and others (e.g., Lehman Brothers) into extinction. Survivors like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were forced to transform into bank holding companies to gain access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window lending programs and deposit insurance, subjecting them to stricter government oversight.
The challenges faced by the old giants were compounded by post-crisis federal regulations (via the Dodd-Frank Act and the Volcker Rule), which targeted speculative trading that created conflicts of interest with clients and required higher asset-to-debt ratios for leveraged investments. As a result, the most aggressive strategies were no longer legal or profitable enough to pursue at scale, opening the door for smaller, more nimble firms drawing on private equity, led by ambitious refugees from money center banks.
Many of these upstarts developed a niche in showbiz. According to Carlos Jimenez, a managing director at Moelis & Company, the reason for this is very simple: “No one ever gets bored talking about media, sports and entertainment,” he says.
That was especially true in 2025, when the most talked-about drama in Hollywood was not anything on the big or small screens, but rather Skydance Media’s on-again, off-again and, finally, on-again $8.4 billion merger with Paramount, backed by RedBird.
RedBird founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale says that the deal wasn’t necessarily the emotional roller coaster it appeared to be.
“To a certain extent, it was business as usual,” says Cardinale, who retired from Goldman Sachs in 2012 and launched RedBird two years later. “Obviously, this was a very complicated transaction where, in a certain way, we had to almost buy it three times. [But] the one thing that has distinguished us over my 35 years [in the business] is that we’re persistent, we’re tenacious, we don’t get emotional about these things.”
Nonetheless, Cardinale agrees that this investment is uniquely significant, both personally and financially. It gives his company RedBird 22.5% voting power in the resulting company, Paramount Skydance, and Cardinale a seat on its board of directors. It puts him second in line behind Skydance Media founder David Ellison, who took the title of chairman and CEO, and his father, tech mega-billionaire Larry Ellison, who collectively control 77.5% of the voting power.
“I looked at a lot of things and passed on them,” says Cardinale. “And what changed it for me was that you had someone like David Ellison, who is a true owner-operator.”
This isn’t the first time a New York-based power broker has gotten a hand on the reins of Paramount. In 1966, Austrian-born Charles Bluhdorn’s automotive parts manufacturing and distribution conglomerate Gulf+Western bought the financially troubled studio, eventually leading to a golden age that produced such classics as “The Godfather” films and “Chinatown.”
Unlike Bluhdorn, Cardinale isn’t a Hollywood newcomer. As he’s quick to point out, this is far from the only significant showbiz investment made by RedBird in recent years. In 2021, it was part of a consortium that bought a significant minority stake in LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s media and entertainment firm SpringHill Company, and the following year it committed a minimum of $100 million to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company Artists Equity. It’s also been active in the sports world, with bets that include paying $750 million for an 11% minority stake in Fenway Sports in 2021 and $1.3 billion for the full acquisition of AC Milan in 2022. More importantly, it’s been investing in Skydance since 2019.
“Redbird, to a certain extent, is an intellectual property monetization engine,” says Cardinale. “We’ve had a long track record of being able to buy into IP-based businesses and effectively we underwrite them, reinvigorate them and reposition them for the 21st century for technological disintermediation,” where middlemen are removed from the supply chain, enabling more efficient and profitable direct-to-consumer transactions.
On the investment side, the results are clear: the entity putting in the money gets an ownership stake. But what do these firms get for their advisory services? Typically, advisors collect retainer fees ($10,000 to $50,000 a month) and success fees (1.5% to 10% of deal value), with the larger deals commanding larger retainers, but lower success fee percentages. With a mega-deal like the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery, which has received dueling offers from Netflix and Paramount topping out at $108.4 billion, the worst-case piece of the deal pie can’t help but be impressive.
And what do the companies get from the advisors?
“We basically do two or three things,” explains Jimenez. “We put our arm around clients during their most important transactions, and that typically is M&A when folks are looking to buy or sell. Also, capital raising, which is when they’re raising debt equity or going public. And then we also have a restructuring business, which is good when things go sideways,” he says, pointing to the work Moelis has done with AMC Theatres, which includes advising on a $600 million strategic investment from Silver Lake in 2018 and its 2020 restructuring strategy. “If you ask [AMC chairman and CEO] Adam Aron, he’d tell you that we had a big hand in keeping his company afloat during really tough times during the pandemic,” he says.
After serving as one of the advisors to Skydance on its Paramount merger, Moelis advised Netflix on its deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which was quickly met with a hostile offer from the company it just helped create. The Raine Group also advised Skydance on the merger (along with BofA Securities and, of course, RedBird), while LionTree and Rothschild & Co. advised Paramount, along with Centerview Partners, which advised the independent special committee of the Paramount board.
But when you untangle these deals, things tend to be a bit less crowded than they might appear to an outsider, according to Jimenez.
On big transactions, “there’s just so much to do in a short period of time, you often need a lot of help, but that’s not always the case,” he says. “Depending on the transaction, sometimes even on some of the big ones, there’s only one or two banks on each side.”