Sean Gamble, the CEO of Cinemark, expressed optimism of Paramount winning the bidding war to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, saying it could be great for movie theaters.
Gamble shared his views on the bidding war fallout when during a session with the Morgan Stanley Investors Conference.
“Both Paramount and Warner Bros. have been longstanding supporters of theatrical exhibition and great partners for Cinemark,” Gamble said. “Based on their actions over many, many years, that’s a real positive. There clearly has been a lean of those organizations to ramp up more into the space.”
Gamble said the movie theater business would also improve if the studios consolidated around increasing the number of theatrical releases while widening their market window.
“We’re hearing all the right things. There’s still a lot of details to work through,” Gamble said.
The streaming giant Netflix backed out of its deal with Warner Bros. Discovery in the wake of the studio’s board deeming Paramount’s improved offer superior. Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters announced in a statement last Thursday that Paramount’s improved offer made the bid for Warner Bros. “no longer financially attractive,” adding that it “was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”
“The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid,” the co-CEOs said.
“Warner Bros. is a world-class organization, and we want to thank David Zaslav, Gunnar Wiedenfels, Bruce Campbell, Brad Singer and the WBD Board for running a fair and rigorous process,” they added. “We believe we would have been strong stewards of Warner Bros.’ iconic brands, and that our deal would have strengthened the entertainment industry and preserved and created more production jobs in the U.S. But this transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”
The co-CEOs pledged to keep pouring cash into creating the “best-in-class streaming service,” adding that the Netflix brand will keep “healthy, strong and growing organically.”
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