Entertainment
Paramount throws in more cash in bid for Warner; Comcast wants to combine assets with NBCUniversal
Paramount is raising the stakes in its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, upping its offer for the assets with backing from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia, while rival Comcast has proposed creating a new entertainment entity.
Instead of offering cash, Comcast has proposed combining NBCUniversal with HBO and the Warner Bros. film and television studios to form a separate stand-alone entertainment company, according to people familiar with the bids but not authorized to comment.
Such a combination would marry robust film studios, deep libraries and middling streaming services, Warner’s HBO Max and NBCUniversal’s Peacock. It would give Universal’s theme parks a wealth of fan-favorite characters — including Batman, Harry Potter and Sheldon Cooper to build new attractions.
Comcast, which would maintain the controlling stake, is not interested in absorbing Warner’s basic cable channels.
Representatives of Paramount, Comcast, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment, citing the confidential nature of the bids.
Comcast, Netflix and Paramount each submitted second-round proposals to Warner’s bankers Monday. Warner Bros. Discovery hopes to select an auction winner this month.
Paramount, controlled by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and his family, has been pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery since September — one month after the billionaire family took the keys to Paramount from former owner Shari Redstone.
With its latest offer, Paramount is hoping to stay competitive with a largely cash bid from streaming giant Netflix, which is interested in Warner Bros.’ enduring intellectual property and the studio’s prestigious 110-acre lot in Burbank.
Bid amounts were unclear Tuesday.
However, analysts say the various combinations could value Warner Bros. Discovery at nearly $70 billion — triple the company’s trading levels in early September.
Paramount is the only bidder interested in swallowing Warner’s portfolio of cable channels that include CNN, TNT, Food Network, Cartoon Network and TLC.
Paramount’s bid provides debt financing from Apollo Global Management and sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the knowledgeable people said. Should Paramount win the Warner auction, the Ellison family and RedBird Capital Partners would maintain majority control of the bulked-up enterprise.
The Middle Eastern investors would have only a small stake, one of the knowledgeable people said.
Variety and Bloomberg previously reported on the Middle Eastern wealth funds’ involvement in Paramount’s bid. Bloomberg first reported on Comcast‘s bid structure.
Each of the various deal configurations would face stiff regulatory scrutiny.
President Trump considers Larry Ellison a friend, so Paramount’s proposed takeover of Warner probably would face a smooth regulatory review process in the U.S. The president has indicated he prefers having Ellison control CBS — part of Paramount — and CNN, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
Combining Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. would give the company about 30% of domestic movie box office.
Still, foreign regulators might wince at a deal that was heavily pushed by Trump, not to mention one that includes Saudi investors in a major entertainment entity that owns CNN, one of the world’s largest news organizations.
Last month, tech scion David Ellison, chairman and chief executive of Paramount, was guest at a White House dinner to honor Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
That state dinner — seven years after bin Salman was considered a pariah after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — underscored Washington’s increasingly warm relations with the Saudi royal family.
But any deal also would be subject to regulators in Europe and Asia.
Comcast would encounter a particularly bumpy regulatory path.
The Philadelphia firm is controlled by cable mogul Brian Roberts, who has long felt Trump’s scorn, in part because of his company’s ownership of liberal-leaning news channel MS NOW, previously known as MSNBC. Comcast is in the process of spinning off MS NOW and other cable channels into a new company called Versant.
Still, some observers believe that opposition by Trump would be enough to thwart Justice Department approval of a Comcast takeover of Warner Bros.
Netflix’s bid also has raised antitrust concerns.
“If Netflix acquires Warner Bros., the streaming wars are effectively over,” Bank of America media analysts wrote in a report this week. “Netflix would become the undisputed global powerhouse of Hollywood beyond even its currently lofty position.”
The Los Gatos, Calif., streaming pioneer has more than 300 million subscribers worldwide. Adding HBO Max would give the company 70 million more, which would dwarf competing services.
“Netflix currently wields unequaled market power,” U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) wrote in a letter last month to U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, whose department would oversee the deal review.
“Adding both HBO Max’s subscribers and Warner Bros.’ premier content rights would further enhance this position, reportedly pushing the combined entity above a 30 percent share of the streaming market: a threshold traditionally viewed as presumptively problematic under antitrust law,” Issa wrote.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
Entertainment
Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day
Victoria Jones, the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, was reportedly found dead at a hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.
According to TMZ, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to a medical emergency call at the Fairmont San Francisco early Thursday morning. The paramedics pronounced Victoria dead at the scene before turning it over to the San Francisco Police Department for further investigation, the outlet said.
An SFPD representative confirmed to The Times that officers responded to a call at approximately 3:14 a.m. Thursday regarding a report of a deceased person at the hotel and that they met with medics at the scene who declared an unnamed adult female dead.
Citing law enforcement sources, NBC Bay Area also reported that the deceased woman found in a hallway of the hotel was believed to be Jones and that police did not suspect foul play.
“We are deeply saddened by an incident that occurred at the hotel on January 1, 2026,” the Fairmont told NBC Bay Area in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences are with the family and loved ones during this very difficult time. The hotel team is actively cooperating and supporting police authorities within the framework of the ongoing investigation.”
The medical examiner conducted an investigation at the scene, but Jones’ cause of death remains undetermined. Dispatch audio obtained by TMZ and People indicated that the 911 emergency call was for a suspected drug overdose.
Jones was the daughter of Tommy Lee and ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley. Her brief acting career included roles on films such as “Men in Black II” (2002), which starred her father, and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005), which was directed by her father. She also appeared in a 2005 episode of “One Tree Hill.”
Page Six reported that Jones had been arrested at least twice in 2025 in Napa County, including an arrest on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and drug possession.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me
Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.
“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”
The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.
But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.
Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.
“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.
“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.
“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.
“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.
And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.
Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.
Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.
The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.
Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.
“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.
Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.
But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.
And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs
Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis
Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:43
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