David Ellison and Paramount will continue to battle for Warner Bros. Discovery.
Paramount on Thursday said that it had filed preliminary proxy materials in anticipation of a proxy fight, and extended its deadline for WBD shareholders to tender their shares to the company for another month.
Earlier this week, Netflix changed its deal to acquire Warner Bros. to be all-cash valued at $27.75 per share (plus the Discovery Global spinoff “stub”), but despite that change Paramount says that it is sticking with its $30 per share offer for the whole company.
Paramount says that it will ask WBD shareholders to reject the merger deal, to reject the Discovery spinoff (which would happen months before the deal is completed) and to reject the pay packages for senior WBD executives, including CEO David Zaslav.
The filing also suggests that Paramount has a long way to go to persuade WBD shareholders. So far a bit over 168 million WBD shares have been tendered, but the company has nearly 2.5 billion shares outstanding.
More to come.