The Reset: Private Equity Rises With the Warner Bros. Discovery Tide
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Welcome enterprise subscribers,
When you drop a gigantic boulder into still waters, it’s going to create some ripples, right?
So much attention has been paid to the bidding war itself for Warner Bros. Discovery, and for good reason — a deal of this size doesn’t come along every day, or every decade, really. It’s destined to trigger broader implications and chain reactions within Hollywood’s ecosystem. Look no further than private equity as a sector ready to ride the ripples.
This past year began with pretty tepid activity for PE investing, but signs of new life began stirring around the summer as firms shook off the willies of a new Trump presidency.
S&P Global Market Intelligence came out this month with its new report on M&A, and highlighted PE’s pickup. “Supersize transactions are sustaining the ongoing recovery in private equity-backed M&A and remain a trend to watch in 2026. Private equity- and venture capital-backed deal value was on track to increase for a second consecutive year in 2025. Mega-deals worth at least $5 billion played a disproportionate role in the rebound, powering private equity dealmaking through a period of uncertainty.”
See the chart below to underscore this.
Bloomberg’s David Rovella reported this past week that “activity appears to have picked up from earlier in the year, when global conflicts and Donald Trump’s trade war caused more executives and companies to pause.” Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer Denis Coleman told Rovella things are loosening up. Activity led by private equity firms is finally rising across the industry, with announced deal volumes up 40% this year. “It’s fair to say it’s now happening,” he said.
WrapPRO’s monthly The Funding File column for September documented the rise of PE-led leveraged buyouts with such deals as the LBO of Electronic Arts.
Then along came the unfolding drama of a WBD takeover. By witnessing a potential deal on this scale, PE players can only be pumped up with new confidence that transformative transactions are still doable, enticing more PE money into the tech, media and telecom space. And if the end result is that Netflix wins, and WBD’s Discovery Global is spun, that just might spur more carve-outs that are like red meat to private equity.
The year is rapidly coming to a close so the trend may not manifest itself until 2026 when we may also see more sovereign wealth funds and traditional institutional investors jump into the fray.
See you next Sunday.
Tom Lowry
Senior Vice President/Editorial Strategy
tom.lowry@thewrap.com
1. TikTok’s Outsized U.S. Ad Bite The sale of a stake in TikTok to U.S. investors still remains in limbo, waiting on regulatory approval and actual approval from China itself. Back in September, President Trump had approved a sale of the ByteDance business to a possible consortium that includes Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz. At the same time, the president has extended the sale of TikTok multiple times, with the latest deadline expiring Dec. 16.
While these machinations go on, the business of TikTok in the U.S. is thriving, as you can see from this chart below from eMarketer. On a relatively small user base in the U.S., this country accounts for 40% of the ad spend. No wonder those U.S. investors must be getting antsy.
2. Lakers Win at Search Too It’s a pretty safe bet to say that the majority of Hollywood is rooting for the LA Lakers at this time of the year. So we know who is driving the data we are sharing here.
Stefan Wojciechowski, founder of Hyperset Group Ltd., posted this chart in the past two weeks on LinkedIn, noting that one in five searches worldwide for an NBA team are for the Lakers.
“The Boston Celtics are next, commanding approximate 8.5% of all NBA team searches worldwide … the Golden State Warriors are third with 7.8 %,” he wrote.
Jon Kamen, who may just be the most prolific producer and storyteller whose name is not easily recognized, is defined by his breadth. As the co-founder, chairman and CEO of RadicalMedia, his body of work, however, is something everyone will know, from recently QuestLove’s “Summer of Soul” to the pilot episode of “Mad Men” to film versions of Broadway’s “Hamilton, ” “American Utopia” and the recent revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, which is now in theaters for a limited run. Under Kamen, Radical also has experimented with new mediums, producing the Apple Vision Pro’s first full-length feature film, “Bono: Stories of Surrender.”
This past week, we posted our latest “Office With a View,” for which our Lucas Manfredi interviewed for the executive Q&A series Kamen and Radical’s president and former MTV vet Dave Sirulnick.
Kamen grew up in the 1950s Americana, pre-Vietnam glow of Jamaica, Queens, N.Y., where his father was a pediatric dentist who treated mentally impaired and handicapped kids. His mom was an elementary school teacher. Kamen first got the media bug working as an assistant for series of photographers, mostly focused on print advertising. But most of whom were itching to move on to film.
“As Steve Horn’s and Norman Griner’s assistant, I learned how to produce. They were photographers who were seriously getting into the television directing thing, because print was dying. Look magazine closed, Life was struggling, but television was just celebrating 20 years of success and looked as though it was going to stick. Any photographer worth his salt was migrating into TV,” Kamen told Shots Magazine in 2011.
There was no looking back for Kamen who became a producer that eventually led him to the idea of starting Radical in 1993. “I co-founded RadicalMedia on the thesis of using our name as a mantra that the world of media was going to change. I wanted to make sure that as a company, we were going to embrace the changes that were going to take place in the media landscape,” Kamen told Manfredi. “We’ve accomplished a lot. We’re not always 100% done with our mission, because you never are, but we are certainly a very diversified company and have produced lots of things in different media. We’re always searching for what that next project might be that excites us as much as the last one.”
As for the ever-complex — and consolidating — entertainment landscape of today, Kamen is sanguine. “There’s no question these are challenging times. But people still need quality storytelling. They need to be inspired and they need original ideas. And that’s where I think we play an important role in leadership and in staying the course but adjusting as we have to.”
Which brands are sponsoring newsletters?, Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter
The future of news is happening where no one is looking, Neiman Lab Predictions for Journalism 2026
College campuses have become a front line in America’s sports-betting boom, The Economist
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