Sony Has Reportedly Thrown Its Hat In The Ring Alongside Apollo To Buy Paramount For $26 Billion, All-Cash

A report from the Wall Street Journal claims that Sony Pictures and private equity firm Apollo Global Management have made a joint bid to buy Paramount Global for a whopping $26 billion, all-cash.

No combination of cash and shares, just straight cash to nab the entertainment giant that’s been floundering of late. Rumours of Paramount being sold have been floating around now for some time, with Sony having already been mentioned as one of the circling potential buyers.

As has Apollo, who the WSJ reports previously made a $26 billion bid plus equity to buy Paramount, but was left rejected due to concerns around whether or not Apollo could really pull together the financing for the deal.

Skydance Media has been the other front-runner to make the purchase, though opinions on dealing with Skydance have been in flux due to shareholders not being too pleased about how controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, would come out of that deal with even more power and control.

All of this hesitation and dissent around how the purchase should go down and the sale being drawn out resulted in Paramount’s now former chief executive officer Bob Bakish departing the company.

When Bakish’s departure was announced, and was replaced by Chris McCarthy, George Cheeks and Brian Robbins all stepping into what they called the “Office of the CEO,” Paramount dodged questions from investors by blasting the Mission Impossible theme song on its latest earnings call.

If this new joint-bid from Sony and Apollo is accepted, then that means all the Sonic movies and tv shows, the Halo tv show, and all of Paramount’s recent original efforts to stack its streaming service with will fall under the Sony umbrella.

It also opens the doors for even more collaborations between Sony and Paramount’s stores of IP, and another avenue for Sony to keep expanding its gaming IP into other mediums.

Source – [Wall Street Journal, IGN]