New York, April 27, 2026, 06:29 EDT
- Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS, ended Friday’s session at $10.97, falling 2.66%. Regular U.S. stock trading hadn’t begun yet Monday.
- Shareholders at Warner Bros Discovery gave the nod to Paramount’s $110 billion takeover plan, putting the deal squarely in the hands of regulators now.
- CBS, CNN, HBO Max, and Paramount+ would all land within the same parent company if the deal goes through.
Paramount Skydance, CBS’s parent, faces another tough premarket session Monday in the U.S. Shares remained in the red after Friday’s close, as investors tallied up a significant deal victory but kept a wary eye on what could be a drawn-out regulatory process.
Retail investors still plug in “CBS stock,” but what they’ll get now is Paramount Skydance Class B, ticker PSKY. That switch came after last year’s Skydance-Paramount tie-up; a company filing confirmed the Class B shares trade on Nasdaq as PSKY. The separate CBS stock? It’s gone. Paramount
Warner Bros Discovery shareholders just signed off on Paramount’s $110 billion merger. That clears a major obstacle and shifts attention right to the antitrust process—now, regulators step in to judge if the deal could stifle competition, push prices higher, or limit what consumers can pick.
Shares of Paramount ended April 24 at $10.97, slipping from $11.27 the previous session and $11.80 back on April 22, company investor-relations data show. Roughly 6.29 million shares changed hands on Friday.
Warner Bros Discovery shareholders gave a resounding yes to the merger with Paramount during a special meeting. Board chair Samuel A. Di Piazza Jr. pointed to what he called stockholder “support and confidence.” CEO David Zaslav described the vote as “another key milestone” on the road to closing the deal. PR Newswire
Things got murky after that. The U.S. Department of Justice issued subpoenas in late March, looking for details about studio output, content rights, streaming rivals, and movie theater dynamics, according to Reuters. PP Foresight’s Paolo Pescatore flagged a “twofold challenge” for management: not just securing approval, but also showing the deal will drive value—without stoking new pay fears. Reuters
Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, flagged that “real regulatory pressure sits overseas”—with European regulators likely to scrutinize how the merged market takes shape. That’s the risk on investors’ minds now. The shareholder vote, required for the deal, wasn’t the finish line. Reuters
The competition is fierce. Paramount beat Netflix after a long battle for Warner Bros, setting up a potential merger that would unite CBS, Paramount+, Warner Bros, HBO Max, and CNN—plus vast film and TV catalogs. Netflix is still the most obvious streaming peer in the mix, but Warner Bros Discovery has shifted from being simply a rival to the main takeover target.
The risk: if regulators or state attorneys general raise antitrust concerns—pointing to impacts on streaming, film, or TV news—the deal could see delays, face pushback, or even end up trimmed down. According to The Guardian, the merger still requires green lights from the Department of Justice and European authorities, and a legal challenge from state attorneys general remains on the table.
CBS isn’t just a network play these days. Reuters’ company profile points out that Paramount Skydance spreads across studios, streaming platforms, and TV media—CBS, CBS News 24/7, and CBS Sports all land under TV Media, which also houses Paramount+, Pluto TV, and BET+.
So Monday’s setup looks straightforward, though hardly effortless. Paramount already has the shareholder vote it required from Warner Bros Discovery. The market’s focus now: sizing up the debt, the timeline, and the regulatory hurdles attached to the deal.
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