Ellison’s Hardball Warner Bros. Tactics Gave Netflix an Opening

On the night of Dec. 3, lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan sent a letter to Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., expressing “serious concerns about the fairness and adequacy” of the company’s sale process. Their client, David Ellison, chairman and chief executive officer of Paramount Skydance Corp., had been pursuing Warner Bros. for months and was worried the deal was slipping through his fingers.

Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav and his advisers were surprised. They believed they had run a fair process. Zaslav had met or spoken with Ellison at least six times in the past two ...