Media and entertainment is seeing a major shakeup in a burst of dealmaking from M&A to spinoffs, AI investment and leveraged buyouts, setting the stage for a pivotal 2026.
Streaming consolidation, local broadcast ownership and Middle Eastern money are big themes. Donald Trump, his donor and friend Larry Ellison, and son-in-law Jared Kushner are key players.
Netflix’s headline-grabbing $82 billion pact for Warner Bros‘ studios and streaming assets toplines deals announced in 2025. Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Kushner’s investment firm Affinity Partners are taking video game giant Electronic Arts private for $55 billion. Broadband behemoth Charter Communications is buying Cox for $34.5 billion. The nation’s biggest broadcaster Nexstar inked a deal to acquire smaller rival Tegna for $6.2 billion. The latter deal requires a loosening of rules prohibiting broadcast owners from owning TV stations reaching more than 39% of the national television audience. All need approval by the Trump administration.
Comcast cable spinoff Versant Media will start trading in days and WBD plans to separate Discovery Global networks from Warner Bros in third quarter of 2026 amid the decline of linear television.
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Disney rounded out 2025 with a milestone $1 billion investment in Sora parent OpenAI, breaking bread with the behemoth that’s been ripping off its IP. Industry pundits expect more of those deals.
“Resistance is futile,” says one industry insider, recalling the famous Star Trek line. “That became clear for the music industry 25 years ago with online distribution. Eventually we legalized it by making it accessible. And the same is going to be true, is true, for AI.”
“For the scraping and the training part, I feel like that ship has left. How do you go back when all the models have already done all the illegal sh*t that they shouldn’t have done, and untrain them? Now it really is going to be a focus on output. And that’s important because with Sora, for example, you tell it, ‘Create something like Star Wars characters for me,’ and it will, and that’s infringement, clearly. It’s just a question of how Disney is going to get compensated for that. These AI companies have the money to make deals and they should make deals with IP owners. They should do it legally. They should do it above board.”
“We’re starting to see people that may have always been on opposite sides of the table talk to each other and play together, and play well in the sandbox, to see what’s … possible,” says Bart Spiegel, Partner, Media & Entertainment at PwC US.
One deal did not make it. Venu Sports, a planned venture of Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney, fell apart. But Disney speedily announced and closed an acquisition of Fubo, which it merged with Hulu + Live TV. Fox launched new streaming service Fox One. Disney debuted its flagship ESPN streamer.
PwC’s recently published US Deals 2026 Outlook noted a major uptick in media and telecom transaction volume and value over the past six months “characterized by headline-grabbing megadeals, increased consolidation within streaming, and a pronounced shift toward profitability and scale — underscoring a renewed confidence among both strategic and financial buyers in deploying capital.”
“A lot of trends came to a head this year,” Spiegel says.
CEOs and fund managers across sectors had, in fact, back in the fall of 2024, anticipated a flood of deals this year if Trump emerged as president on a tide of deregulation. But POTUS himself choked deal flow by unleashing intense tariff chaos in the first part of the year. “We were expecting it to be the year of just a ridiculous amount of M&A,” says one Wall Streeter. “But there was a lot of volatility in the system, and uncertainty in the markets.”
Then the dust settled, although average tariffs – taxes on imports – are still hovering at about 16.8%, the highest they’ve been since 1935, according to The Budget Lab at Yale.
High Hollywood Drama
And even as M&A across sectors accelerated this summer and fall, media deals appeared to be in the hot seat, as many had predicted.
President Trump often disparages mainstream news outlets and has sued CNN, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and the BBC, among others. He frequently threatens to pull broadcast licenses if he dislikes coverage. Brendan Carr, whom Trump named to lead the FCC, approved Paramount’s long-gestating merger with Skydance only after the CBS parent settled its lawsuit for $16 million. “Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change,” Carr said in a statement along with the commission greenlight.
So, as the next momentous deal takes shape around Warner Bros Discovery, it wasn’t a surprise exactly when Trump said, “I’ll be involved in that decision too.”
WBD earlier this month inked the deal with Netflix after spurning a half dozen bids from Paramount Skydance including a hostile takeover offer by the Ellison-backed studio. CEO David Ellison and his father Larry with partner RedBird Capital are offering $30 a share in cash for the entire company and insist it has a clearer path to regulatory approval. The Netflix deal is for $27.75 for the studio and streaming businesses, made up of $23.25 in cash and $4.50 in Netflix stock. Both sides have been wooing Trump.
“The race is neck and neck right now,” says analyst Peter Supino of Wolfe Research. He thinks “Paramount will get it because they need it more.”
Netflix “is evidently serious. But Paramount has an imperative to get bigger. They need to matter more to consumers.”
“It’s a ‘nice-to-have’ for Netflix because it will give them control over more IP,” agrees Seaport Research Partners analyst David Joyce. “It’s more of a must-have for Paramount Skydance because they do need more scale.”
He and others think Paramount has a good shot at derailing Netflix if it raises its bid. WBD has said it’s considering Par’s latest offer, which included a new $40 billion+ financing guarantee by Larry Ellison personally, but did not add more cash. Outside funders include Public Investment Fund (Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (Abu Dhabi) and Qatar Investment Authority. Kushner’s Affinity Partners was initially part of the group but dropped out.
“We’re waiting for the Warner Bros board to officially opine on their offer … but they didn’t increase the value of their bid. I think that they do need to do that,” Joyce says. Paramount’s offer values Discovery Global assets at $1 a share. “I think it’s worth more like $3.50 to $4 per share. So I think Paramount Skydance will come back with a higher offer. And that will be a way for Netflix to exit gracefully.” He doesn’t expect the giant streamer to counter a higher bid from Paramount.
“Studios and streamer and network companies are in reinvention mode. Have been for several years,” Joyce recalls. “In streaming, you had this transition from land-grab mode, which was kind of from when Disney bought [21st Century] Fox [in 2018], up until 2022, when Netflix stock fell 80% and all the streamers decided they had to get profitable.” Netflix shares plunged in 2022 as it reported the first subscriber losses in over a decade. It marked and end to the era of streamers spending massively to gain share in an increasingly competitive market.
“Over the last two years, you were transitioning out of that land-grab mode into a focus on efficiency. And part of efficiency was increasing prices and cutting costs, and part of it is merging with other companies. And so we see Warner Bros deciding to spin off Discovery. And then Skydance taking over Paramount, and making a hostile bid for Warner. And Netflix taking a shot at Warner Bros. Comcast spinning off Versant is kind of the opposite of consolidation. It’s de-consolidation. But it’s an important acknowledgment that these companies all want to focus their capital on getting stronger in the areas that matter to the future.”
TikTok & The Free Radicals
In other pending deals, a consortium of investors including Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and the United Arab Emirates’ state-backed investment firm MGX look set to take about 80% of a new American version of TikTok. That would be a notable deal for the hugely popular video app currently controlled by China’s ByteDance, which would control about 20%. The future of TikTok in the U.S. has been an ongoing legal and strategic muddle.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew told staff the U.S. JV transaction is set to close January 22. Fox Corp. had also been in talks to join the U.S. investment consortium.
And companies that Liberty Media founder John Malone once dubbed as “free radicals” — like Lionsgate Studios and Starz (now separate publicly traded entities) and AMC Networks (controlled by the Dolan family) — have seen their shares climb recently and may ultimately find strategic partners.
Starz has been talking with Disney and Hearst-owned A+E Global Media.
At Lionsgate, a one-year shareholder-rights plan, or so-called poison pill, which protects companies against hostile takeovers, expires in May.
“There has been some value recognition that has come back into these shares of the smaller companies in the space,” says Seaport’s Joyce.
Sports valuations are surging across the ecosystem, PwC notes. “Capital continues to flow into the sports value chain, from team ownership, up-and-coming leagues outside traditional Big Four, and stadium assets, to media rights and women’s leagues, as investors pursue durable, fan-driven returns.”
The sale of Los Angeles Lakers to Dodgers owner Mark Walter for a $10 billion valuation, a new benchmark, reinforces “that sports intellectual property (IP), live rights, and venue infrastructure now sit at the intersection of media, entertainment, and private capital.”
Says Spiegel: “It’s about where are people going to be spending their free time, and what are people focused on.”