Bela Bajaria said Netflix has moved on from its failed bid for Warner Bros. Discovery and has no regrets about passing on the deal. Speaking at MIPCOM in Cannes, she cast the company as selective rather than aggressive, saying the target was always “a nice to have at a certain price, not a must have at any price.”
The comments land now because Warner Bros. Discovery has already been sold to David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance for $110B, after Netflix’s own bid was reported at $83B. That gap matters: it shows how far Netflix was willing to go before stopping, and it puts a hard number on the price discipline Bajaria was defending in public.
Bajaria said Netflix was “financially disciplined” and would never spend over the odds, adding that the company knew what it had and what the opportunity was. In other words, Warner Bros. Discovery was attractive, but only within a ceiling Netflix would not cross. The sale price to Paramount-Skydance was $27B above Netflix’s bid, a spread that makes the decision look less like hesitation than a deliberate choice to walk away.
She also tied that restraint to the broader shape of Netflix’s business. The company, she said, occupies around 5% of global audiences’ TV time and remains focused on keeping its current strategy intact, continuing to invest at the same level, and making shows people around the world want to watch. Bajaria pointed to Netflix’s continued expansion across 80 countries and said the service has kept growing its investment even when others have scaled back.
That leaves the sharper question not about whether Netflix wanted Warner Bros. Discovery, but how much it was ever prepared to pay for it. Bajaria’s answer was clear enough: the company saw value, but not enough to abandon the spending rules that have shaped its growth so far. For now, Netflix is choosing to build around what it already has rather than chase a deal it was never willing to overpay for.
