Paramount Dealmaker Says Warner Merger Is About Growth, Not Cuts

(Bloomberg) -- Gerry Cardinale, the founder of the investment firm RedBird Capital Partners and one of the architects of Paramount Skydance Corp.'s pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., said the performance of the combined companies will impress investors.

"I think you'll be surprised," Cardinale said Thursday at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles. "I think we're going to show a trajectory of real meaningful growth."

Cardinale said that while there will be cost-cutting and people that end up in new positions, that is not the reason behind the big merger, which will put two of the industry's most famous film studios under one corporate umbrella.

A company wouldn't spend billions of dollars a year making movies, "and figure your entire premise of your business plan is to fire everybody in Hollywood," Cardinale said. "It's just the opposite."

The 58-year-old former Goldman Sachs Group investment banker has been behind some of the biggest deals in the media industry in recent years. Cardinale negotiated and helped finance Skydance Media's takeover of Paramount Global last year and immediately began backing Skydance founder David Ellison's next bid, the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros.

That bruising battle dragged on for months. Paramount initially lost the fight to Netflix Inc. before coming back with a superior offer in February. Paramount looks to be on track to close the deal on Oct. 6, after negotiating a settlement with 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild trade union, which had tried block the merger in court.

Cardinale bristled at the idea that the close relationship the Ellison family has with President Donald Trump is what tipped the scale in the mega-merger winning approved by federal regulators.

"This coziness with Trump thing is, you know, it's way overstated," Cardinale said. "Anybody in corporate America should have a relationship with that administration, and that's not because it's Trump, right? Trump is pro-business. He's very interested in the technology community."

Other RedBird deals this year included an investment in newsletter and podcaster Puck, and the merger of European TV producers Banijay Entertainment and ALL3Media, a deal financed though its RedBird IMI joint venture with Abu Dhabi based-IMI media group.