Reports: Potential Bidder Emerges For Paramount

Shari Redstone is launching a formal auction of National Amusements, the holding company that controls struggling media giant Paramount Global, The NY Post is reporting.

BDT Capital Partners, the bankers for Redstone, the 69-year-old daughter of late media baron Sumner Redstone, have begun circulating nondisclosure agreements to private-equity firms to view National Amusements’ financials — widening the search for prospective bidders which thus far have included Warner Bros. Discovery, according to sources close to the situation.

Redstone is looking for a steep markup for National Amusements, which has a 10% stake in Paramount Global and controls 77% of its voting shares — as much as 50% of its market value, according to a source briefed on the process.

Redstone

“I think she would prefer to sell all of it instead of just the holding company,” a source close to Redstone said, noting that talks to sell Paramount Global itself haven’t yet borne fruit. “But there might not be a bid out there.”

Paramount Global — whose movie studio is behind the “Mission: Impossible” and “Transformers” franchises, and also owns CBS, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV — ended Wednesday with a market capitalization of $9.4 billion, giving National Amusements’ shares in the company a face value just shy of $1 billion.

The stake could be worth considerably more given the voting shares’ control over Paramount. In addition, National Amusements owns a handful of money-losing movie-theater chains including Showcase Cinemas, Multiplex Cinemas and Cinema de lux.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Skydance, the Hollywood studio that co-produced “Top Gun: Maverick” with Paramount, is in talks for an all-cash bid for National Amusements, with Skydance CEO David Ellison getting backing from his tech tycoon father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

Ellison is angling to buy at least a majority stake in National Amusements with an eye toward merging his studio with Paramount, according to the paper.

Those talks are in the “very early stages” and could fall apart, the paper reported on Wednesday.