In the world of high-stakes M&A, the Wall Street bankers who worked on the monster Warner Bros. Discovery deal seem to have inherited the Midas touch.
On Thursday, a transaction that proved to be one of the most expensive corporate dramas in Hollywood history started to come to a close. The saga — a fight between Paramount Skydance and Netflix that stood to decide the media industry’s future — was a high-profile test for all the banks involved.
Some of the country’s biggest lenders and most elite advisory firms pitched in — from JPMorgan Chase and Centerview Partners, to Wells Fargo Securities and more. It began in December when Netflix launched an $82.7 billion bid for select WBD assets — an offer that was later upended by a counteroffer from David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, valuing the media giant at about $111 billion including debt.
The battle for WBD played out amid a pivotal backdrop for Wall Street: a period investment banks hope will mark a full-throated M&A rebound, in which just landing a role on a deal of this size is as useful for one’s street cred as actually winning it. Even advisers on the losing side will walk away with hefty fees, boardroom credibility, and proof they belong on the biggest mandates of the coming year.
The tension surrounding the transaction, which remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, rippled across Wall Street. Nearly half of this year’s top 20 dealmakers on Business Insider’s annual Rainmakers list — compiled with MergerLinks, a division of Datasite — were tied to the deal in some capacity.
New banks on the block
Bank of America and Citi, along with private equity giant Apollo, have organized a roughly $54 billion debt financing package backing Paramount Skydance’s bid — one of the largest financing commitments assembled in recent years. The scale of the package underscores just how aggressively lenders are positioning themselves for a dealmaking upswing.
“Top down, I think it’s a win because you’re seeing a $110-plus billion deal get done that’s going to require a lot of heavy lifting on the IB side,” Brian Mulberry, a senior client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management, told Business Insider on Friday. He said Paramount Skydance’s bid requires financing for roughly half the transaction value — a scale that could translate into significant fees for the lenders and advisers involved.
On the losing side of the bidding war, Netflix’s retreat is being viewed by some analysts as a moment of discipline rather than outright defeat.
One beneficiary of that framing is Jeff Hogan, Wells Fargo’s head of global mergers and acquisitions, a spearhead of the bank’s work on the deal, who landed at No. 1 among North American dealmakers on our most recent Rainmakers list.
For Wells Fargo, the mandate carried significant symbolic weight. Last summer, the Federal Reserve lifted a stifling asset cap that had constrained the bank, as punishment for its series of consumer banking scandals. Since then, Wells has engaged in a spirited push to grow its investment banking and advisory presence — vaulting it from 17th place on LSEG’s worldwide M&A league table in 2024 to ninth in 2025.
Landing a role alongside Netflix in a transaction of this magnitude was viewed by industry observers as a reflection of that effort. Indeed, advising a client to walk away from an $80-plus billion bid — and securing a multi-billion-dollar breakup fee in the process — offers a powerful talking point in future boardroom pitches. When Wells Fargo bankers sit down with CEOs going forward, they’ll be able to point to the Netflix mandate as evidence they’re no longer chasing supporting roles in Wall Street’s biggest productions.
“Netflix choosing them as a syndicate partner was a big reputational win,” Mulberry said. “You can gain credibility by knowing when not to overpay.”
The boutiques make their mark
While America’s biggest banks by assets were instrumental in assembling financing firepower, boutique advisers played a pivotal role in shaping the prevailing narrative in the boardroom.
Centerview’s Blair Effron reinforced his reputation as one of media’s most influential advisers, with Centerview serving as a lead financial adviser to Paramount Skydance on the Warner Bros. Discovery bid.
For Gerry Cardinale, founder of RedBird Capital — a key Skydance investor that also advised on the deal — the transaction illustrates the firm’s builder’s strategy. Rather than simply taking passive minority stakes, RedBird has focused on backing and assembling platforms that control valuable intellectual property and can compete at scale in a tech-disrupted entertainment landscape. That includes stepping in when legacy media assets are fragmented or under pressure from declining linear-TV revenues and shifting consumer habits — forces that have made the economics of traditional studios increasingly uncomfortable.
Industry participants say the deal’s scale serves as a harbinger of renewed confidence across corporate America. “There’s still confidence in the broader economy,” Mulberry said, saying that uncertainty about factors like AI’s impact on employment aren’t alarming enough to jettison the optimism that’s taking hold.
“At the end of the day, we are still looking at some pretty strong fundamentals,” he continued. “That allows a deal of this size to get done with confidence.”
Still, even in a world where everyone claims some sort of victory, some trophies are still undeniably larger than others.
Netflix is walking away with $2.8 billion in cash and a stock price that rose as investors breathed a sigh of relief. Paramount Skydance moves closer to assembling a global entertainment empire.
And the banks?
They’ll collect the advisory fees, the financing mandates, and the bragging rights — which might actually be the most valuable prize of all.
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