Paramount is staying the course on its $30-a-share bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, again appealing directly to shareholders.

The move comes after Warner Bros. Discovery’s board voted unanimously this week to reject Paramount’s revised bid, in which billionaire Larry Ellison agreed to personally guarantee the equity portion of his son’s firm’s financing package.

Paramount Skydance, in a Thursday statement, sidestepped Warner’s latest complaints about the enormous debt load that Paramount would need to pull off a takeover. Paramount instead said the appeal of its bid should be obvious: $30 a share in cash for all of Warner Bros. Discovery, including its large portfolio of cable channels, including CNN, HGTV, TBS and Animal Planet.

Warner board members have countered that Netflix’s $27.75 cash and stock bid for much of the company is superior because Netflix is a stronger company. Warner also has complained that it would have to incur billions in costs, including a $2.8-billion break-up fee, if it were to abandon the deal it signed with Netflix on Dec. 4.

The streaming giant has agreed to buy HBO, HBO Max and the Warner Bros. film and television studios, leaving Warner to spin off its basic cable channels into a separate company later this year.

The murky value of Warner’s cable channel portfolio has become a bone of contention in the company’s sale.

“Our offer clearly provides WBD investors greater value and a more certain, expedited path to completion,” Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison said in Thursday’s statement. Paramount said it had resolved all the concerns that Warner had raised last month, “most notably by providing an irrevocable personal guarantee by Larry Ellison for the equity portion of the financing.”

Paramount is gambling that Warner investors will evaluate the two offers and sell their shares to Paramount. Stockholders have until Jan. 21 to tender their Warner shares, although Paramount could extend that deadline.

The Netflix transaction offers Warner shareholders $23.25 in cash, $4.50 in Netflix stock and shares in the new cable channel company, Discovery Global, which Warner hopes to create this summer.

Comcast spun off most of its NBCUniversal cable channels this month, including CNBC and MS NOW, creating a new company called Versant. The result hasn’t been pretty. Versant shares have plunged about 25% from Monday’s $45.17 opening price. On Thursday, Versant shares were selling for about $32.50. (Versant has said it expected volatility earlyon as large index funds sold shares to rebalance their portfolios).

Paramount has argued that fluctuations in Netflix’s stock also reduces the value of the Netflix offer.

“Throughout this process, we have worked hard for WBD shareholders and remain committed to engaging with them on the merits of our superior bid and advancing our ongoing regulatory review process,” Ellison said.

Paramount is relying on equity backing from three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia. It turned to Apollo Global for much of its debt financing. Warner said this week that Paramount’s proposed $94 billion debt and equity financing package would make its proposed takeover of Warner the largest leveraged buyout ever.

Amid the stalemate, Paramount and Warner stock held steady. Paramount was trading around $12.36, while Warner shares are hovering around $28.50 on Thursday.

It plays a little loose with facts but the righteous rage of “Dog Day Afternoon” is present enough in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” a based-on-a-true-tale hostage thriller that’s as deeply 1970s as it is contemporary.

In February 1977, Tony Kiritsis walked into the Meridian Mortgage Company in downtown Indianapolis and took one of its executives, Dick Hall, hostage. Kiritsis held a sawed-off shotgun to the back of Hall’s head and draped a wire around his neck that connected to the gun. If he moved too much, he would die.

The subsequent standoff moved to Kiritsis’ apartment and eventually concluded in a live televised news conference. The whole ordeal received some renewed attention in a 2022 podcast dramatization starring Jon Hamm.

But in “Dead Man’s Wire,” starring Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis, these events are vividly brought to life by Van Sant. It’s been seven years since Van Sant directed, following 2018’s “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” and one of the prevailing takeaways of his new film is that that’s too long of a break for a filmmaker of Van Sant’s caliber.

Working from a script by Austin Kolodney, the filmmaker of “My Own Private Idaho” and “Good Will Hunting” turns “Dead Man’s Wire” into not a period-piece time capsule but a bracingly relevant drama of outrage and inequality. Tony feels aggrieved by his mortgage company over a land deal the bank, he claims, blocked. We’re never given many specifics, but at the same time, there’s little doubt in “Dead Man’s Wire” that Tony’s cause is just. His means might be desperate and abhorrent, but the movie is very definitely on his side.

That’s owed significantly to Skarsgård, who gives one of his finest and least adorned performances. While best known for films like “It,” “The Crow” and “Nosferatu,” here Skarsgård has little more than some green polyester and a very ’70s mustache to alter his looks. The straightforward, jittery intensity of his performance propels “Dead Man’s Wire.”

Yet Van Sant’s film aspires to be a larger ensemble drama, which it only partially succeeds at. Tony’s plight is far from a solitary one, as numerous threads suggest in Kolodney’s fast-paced script. First and foremost is Colman Domingo as a local DJ named Fred Temple. (If ever there were an actor suited, with a smooth baritone, to play a ’70s radio DJ, it’s Domingo.) Tony, a fan, calls Fred to air his demands. But it’s not just a media outlet for him. Fred touts himself as “the voice of the people.”

Something similar could be said of Tony, who rapidly emerges as a kind of folk hero. As much as he tortures his hostage (a very good Dacre Montgomery), he’s kind to the police officers surrounding him. And as he and Dick spend more time together, Dick emerges as a kind of victim, himself. It’s his father’s bank, and when Tony gets M.L. Hall (Al Pacino) on the phone, he sounds painfully insensitive, sooner ready to sacrifice his son than acknowledge any wrongdoing.

Pacino’s presence in “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nod to “Dog Day Afternoon,” a movie that may be far better — but, then again, that’s true of most films in comparison to Sidney Lumet’s unsurpassed 1975 classic. Still, Van Sant’s film bears some of the same rage and disillusionment with the meatgrinder of capitalism as “Dog Day.”

There’s also a telling, if not entirely successful subplot of a local TV news reporter (Myha’la) struggling against stereotypes. Even when she gets the goods on the unspooling news story, the way her producer says to “chop it up” and put it on air makes it clear: Whatever Tony is rebelling against, it’s him, not his plight, that will be served up on a prime-time plate.

It doesn’t take recent similar cases of national fascination, such as Luigi Mangione, charged with killing a healthcare executive, to see contemporary echoes of Kiritsis’ tale. The real story is more complicated and less metaphor-ready, of course, than the movie, which detracts some from the film’s gritty sense of verisimilitude. Staying closer to the truth might have produced a more dynamic movie.

But “Dead Man’s Wire” still works. In the film, Tony’s demands are $5 million and an apology. It’s clear the latter means more to him than the money. The tragedy in “Dead Man’s Wire” is just how elusive “I’m sorry” can be.

“Dead Man’s Wire,” a Row K Entertainment release, is rated R for language throughout. Running time: 105 minutes. Three stars out of four.

In a bid for greater user engagement, Walt Disney Co. will introduce vertical videos to its Disney+ app over the next year, a company executive said Wednesday.

The move is part of the Burbank media and entertainment company’s effort to encourage more frequent app usage, particularly on smartphones.

“We know that mobile is an incredible opportunity to turn Disney+ into a true daily destination for fans,” Erin Teague, executive vice president of product management, said during an onstage presentation in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. “All of the short-form Disney content you want, all in one unified app.”

Teague said the company will evolve that capability over time to determine new formats, categories and content types.

Disney’s presentation also touched on its interest in artificial intelligence. Last month, San Francisco startup OpenAI said it had reached a licensing deal with Disney to use more than 200 of the company’s popular characters in its text-to-video tool, Sora. Under the terms of that deal, users will be able to write prompts that generate short videos featuring Disney characters and use ChatGPT images to create those characters’ visages. Some of those Sora-generated videos will be shown on Disney+, though the companies said the deal did not include talent likenesses or voices.

Disney also said it would invest $1 billion into the AI company.

Part of Disney’s move toward AI is to appeal to young Gen Alpha viewers, who are more comfortable with AI and “expect to interact with entertainment” instead of simply watching stories on the screen, Teague said.

“AI is an accelerator,” she said. “It’s why collaborations with partners like OpenAI are absolutely crucial. We want to empower a new generation of fandom that is more interactive and immersive, while also respecting human creativity and protecting user safety.”