Shari Redstone changed her mind, again!
The media heiress reached a preliminary agreement to sell her controlling stake in Paramount Global to Skydance Media – just weeks after she walked away from a deal between the two sides, according to multiple reports Tuesday.
Redstone, who controls the entertainment giant through her 77% stake in family firm National Amusements, informed a special committee of the Paramount Global board she had reached a deal, two sources told Reuters.
The special committee is now evaluating whether to combine Paramount, home of the namesake studio, CBS and Nickelodeon, with Skydance – run by tech heir David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Skydance will pay $1.75 billion for National Amusements as part of the deal, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the news earlier on Tuesday.
The independent studio – which has produced films like “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” and “Top Gun: Maverick” for Paramount – and National Amusements have also agreed to a 45-day “go-shop period” in which other interested Paramount bidders can make offers for the company, the Journal reported.
Paramount, National Amusements and Skydance declined to comment.
Paramount owns the namesake film studio, CBS, MTV and Nickelodeon as well as its streaming service. The company has struggled with a cable business in decline, a hefty debt load and a costly build-out of its streaming business.
Shares of Paramount popped 9% in after-hours trading on the Skydance news.
The deal comes after Redstone had abruptly ended talks with David Ellison in June, killing the potential sale of a controlling stake in Paramount Global to the independent studio.
Under the terms of that deal, Skydance would have bought National Amusements for around $1.7 billion in cash and would have provided $4.5 billion to buy out a certain number of Paramount’s nonvoting shares and non-Redstone voting shares, the Journal reported.
Skydance also would have injected $1.5 billion onto Paramount’s balance sheet, which it could use to pay down its $14 billion debt load.
The stunning turn-around comes a day after billionaire media mogul Barry Diller entered the Paramount saga by announcing he is exploring a bid to buy Redstone’s NAI stake, The New York Times reported.
It also comes ahead of next week’s Sun Valley conference in Idaho, which attracts many media titans.
Diller scoffed at the notion that he needed financial partners to acquire Redstone’s stake.
“Absurd, IAC has cash and liquidity in excess of $4 billion,” he told The Post on Tuesday.
National Amusements owns movie theaters in the United States, Britain and Latin America, and holds the Redstone family’s 77% of Paramount’s class A voting stock.
NAI also had received interest from two other suitors, an investor consortium led by Hollywood producer Steven Paul, and media exec Edgar Bronfman Jr., who is backed by private equity firm Bain Capital.
Sony Pictures and the private equity firm Apollo Global Management had also expressed interest in buying Paramount for $26 billion.
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