No Deal: Shari Redstone Ends Talks On Skydance Offer for Paramount Global

Some interesting stuff in this article.

It looks like Skydance thought that getting the non-voting class B Paramount shareholders on board would put pressure on the voting ones.

But it seems like Redstone was sensitive to the minority group of voting shareholders and that they were not on side. That is, it wasn’t enough to have the Redstones as the majority holders of class A NAI shares, and the majority of non-voting class B Paramount shareholders, Shari Redstone felt she had to have sufficient support from the minority of voting NAI shareholders to avoid problems such as accusations of imposing losses on a group.

“According to a source familiar with the talks, Redstone’s request for a “majority of the minority” vote, in which other Class A shareholders could vote to approve or nix the deal, was a nonstarter for Skydance, and the studio was anticipating a regulatory review of more than a year, which gave Redstone pause given the constraints it would have required of the business in the meantime.”

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Shari Redstone has ended talks on the latest offer for Paramount Global from the consortium led by Skydance and RedBird Capital, placing the future of the entertainment company into a fresh period of uncertainty, a source confirms to The Hollywood Reporter.

But the Skydance team — which submitted its best and final offer in April — has long been betting that other suitors will eventually drop out.

National Amusements is a regional movie theater chain, however Sumner Redstone turned it into a media behemoth by acquiring Viacom, Paramount and CBS.

Those three executives, Brian Robbins, George Cheeks and Chris McCarthy outlined their own “shared vision” for the company.

“We downgraded Paramount due to the degradation of credit metrics from the accelerating declines in linear media and the shift toward a more competitive and less certain streaming model,” S&P’s Naveen Sarma wrote.

He added in a note after Bakish departed that the “shared management structure is not sustainable for Paramount Global, or for any publicly traded company, outside of a short transitional period.”

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