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Over an intense six-week period last fall, Netflix went from an initial phone call between co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav to sealing an $82.7 billion deal to buy Warner Bros.’ streaming
and studios business . But even after being repeatedly rebuffed David Ellison refused to give up, and ultimately his Paramount Skydance outbid Netflix with an $111 billion offer for the entirety of WBD.
So the news Monday that Comcast plans to carve off NBCUniversal (together with Sky) as an independently traded entity immediately made people wonder: Would Netflix go back to the M&A trenches to try to win a deal for NBCU?
After all, separated from Comcast, NBCU looks similar — kind of, sort of — to the Warner Bros. streaming and studios businesses that Netflix had made a multibillion-dollar bet on. Both have streaming services (Peacock and HBO Max) that would benefit from Netflix’s much larger scale, coupled with TV and film production studios that would give juice to its content pipeline. Also note that Comcast was in the game: The company in December 2025 formally entered a bid to buy the Warner Bros. streaming and studios assets with a “headline price” of $35.43 per WBD share.
After the spin-off announcement, Comcast execs firmly denied that the separation of the cable and NBCU/Sky businesses signaled expected M&A actions. Comcast chairman and co-CEO Brian Roberts said, “Absolutely not,” and co-chief Mike Cavanagh (who is slated to become CEO of the stand-alone NBCU) said, “Definitely not.”
“Our plan for NBCUniversal and Sky is to build and invest for growth,” Cavanagh said on the call with analysts. “We have the ambition, that’s big, to pursue opportunities that keep us ahead of evolving consumer behavior and audience demands. And we have the freedom now to explore adjacent businesses where we have the right to play.”
You could read the disavowals about M&A from Comcast’s top execs as reflecting their desire to project the image that, if any merger or acquisition opportunities were on the horizon, they would be negotiating from a position of strength. As such, some observers speculated that Comcast and NBCU independently will indeed be chasing big deals on their own. But that wouldn’t be until after the transaction is completed, expected in mid-2027, while “to preserve the tax-free nature of the spin, a sale [of NBCU] can’t even be contemplated for a couple of years,” according to Craig Moffett, principal analyst and co-founder of MoffettNathanson.
Moffett doesn’t see any obvious M&A deals emerging from the separation of Comcast and NBCU. Here’s an excerpt of his discussion about Netflix as a potential acquirer of NBCU: “When Netflix made its run at WBD, it arguably tipped its hand. Netflix wanted Warner’s library, and it wanted Warner’s IP.” But NBCU’s library and IP “aren’t quite the equal of Warner’s — most would agree there’s a rather large gap — but they’re the next best,” Moffett wrote in a June 29 research note.
Peacock had 46 million subscribers as of Q1 (up 2 million from the end of 2025), making it significantly smaller than Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ or Hulu. But “Peacock’s scale problem doesn’t demand M&A,” Moffett wrote. “It can be far more readily addressed through simple distribution agreements. The scale that matters isn’t the size of the company, it’s the size of the content bundle.”
While NBCU has spun off most of its (declining) cable TV networks into Versant Media, it still owns the NBC broadcast business. LightShed Partners analyst Rich Greenfield, in a blog post, pointed out that Netflix would not want to own the NBC network and stations, which would entail direct regulation by the FCC. And whereas HBO was a prestige brand fueling Netflix’s interest in the Warner Bros. case, “Peacock is not an asset Netflix would want to buy or maintain,” Greenfield wrote. He added, “We also find it hard to believe Netflix really wants to own a large theme park business, which is NBCU’s primary asset” — its most profitable segment. Plus, while Universal Studios would be attractive, especially the Illumination animation business (which is behind franchises including Despicable Me and Minions), “it feels hard to separate the studio from the rest of the company.”
Indeed, an independent NBCU would more likely be a buyer than a seller, per Greenfield. He cites potential targets as Sony Pictures Entertainment, Roblox and Mediawan.
Meanwhile, there was chatter that the Comcast-NBCU split would set up Comcast to merge with the U.S.’s biggest cable operator, Charter Communications (whose deal to buy Cox is pending). But “the logic against a Charter merger is even clearer” than any deal involving NBCU, according to Moffett. “Both Comcast and Charter are amply large enough that further benefits from scale in SG&A or, say, procurement, would be minimal,” he wrote, adding that any gains in negotiating leverage for programming deals would not be as meaningful as they once were. And even if national regulators were willing to allow OK a Comcast-Charter merger, state regulatory commissions “would make the regulatory process a nightmare.”
After Sarandos walked away from the deal, he admitted he was disappointed that Netflix lost the fight for Warner Bros. But overall, the company came out of the process “with no change in our capital allocation philosophy,” he said on the streamer’s Q1 earnings interview in April.
And while Netflix was willing to spend big on WB, it had its limits. “We said this from the beginning, that the WB deal was a ‘nice to have,’ not a ‘need to have,'” Sarandos said. NBCU would probably be a nice to have. But it’s highly doubtful Netflix would go all out to acquire it.
