By Lucia Stein, ABC News
Photo: Kristina Kormilitsyna / POOL / AFP
The battle over who will own Warner Bros Discovery is a plot-line worthy of a Hollywood drama.
The sale of any company, big or small, is a complex affair that involves a team of professionals, lengthy negotiation and a great deal of money.
But the acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery also features personal dinners, Gulf financing, desperate texts - and some of the richest and most powerful people in the world.
The cast includes Hollywood heavyweights, tech billionaires and Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
It is not hard to guess why there has been a messy scramble to secure the keys to one of the crown jewels of Hollywood.
Warner Bros Discovery is home to some of the biggest films in cinema, including Casablanca and the Harry Potter franchise, as well as a slate of hugely popular HBO shows such as the Sopranos and Succession.
The company went through a mega merger in 2022 when WarnerMedia - a behemoth that owned Warner Bros studios, HBO and CNN - merged with the smaller Discovery, which specialised in factual content such as the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet.
But with deteriorating ratings and revenue decline in its cable network in the age of streaming, chief executive David Zaslav announced in June that Warner Bros Discovery would cleave itself into two companies.
The assumption was that its parts could be worth more than the whole, with the television, movies and streaming business to be spun off into one publicly traded company and its cable networks, including CNN, into another.
That is when chief executive of Paramount Skydance David Ellison, the son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Elllison, entered the chat with a pitch to gobble up the company in its entirety before it was divided.
In what analysts des
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