Skydance's Warner Bros. carries $80 billion of debt — and DC could end up at Disney
Wall Street calls the Skydance sell-off a technicality. An $80 billion debt pile says Warner Bros. was bought to be sold off, and Reddit is already pricing up DC.
Skydance Corp ended its first full week as the owner of Warner Bros. by losing roughly 22% of its market value in one session. On Wednesday, 14 October 2026, the stock closed at around $6.80, after dipping by more than a quarter intraday, as 470.7 million new warrants started trading separately from the shares. The $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery had closed eight days earlier, on 6 October.
The finance press has a tidy explanation, and to be fair, it holds up. Every Class B shareholder on the books on 5 October got one warrant per share: a ten-year right to buy more stock at $12. From Wednesday, new buyers stopped getting that freebie, so a slice of the share price simply walked off into a separate ticker, SKYD WS. On paper, it's a technicality, not a verdict.
The number the warrants don't touch
The warrants explain one rough Wednesday, not the balance sheet. And the balance sheet is what decides the future of Batman, Harry Potter and HBO. Here is what Skydance is working with:
- The price: $110 billion for Warner Bros. Discovery, or $31 a share, after Netflix declined to raise its bid.
- The debt: net debt of about $79 billion for the combined company, by Paramount's own estimate, with $52 billion raised in loans and bonds to get the deal done.
- The savings: more than $6 billion a year in cost cuts, promised within three years.
- The warrants: about $5.65 billion if every one is exercised. The stock has to climb roughly 77% before anyone has a reason to bother.
Even MoffettNathanson's forecast of $16 billion in EBITDA for 2028 leaves the debt at about five years of earnings, before a penny of interest. A new Batman every couple of years doesn't close that gap. Neither does another Hogwarts box set.
Debt this size isn't paid off with Batman and Harry Potter. It's paid off by selling them.
Skydance hasn't said that out loud. The people who buy the cinema tickets said it within hours.
Reddit has already started the auction
On the r/movies thread about the slide, the comment explaining what a stock warrant is got 29 upvotes. The top one, at 779, read: "Number go down. Debt go up. Merger somehow allowed. Profit?"
"Their debt will be so damn massive that they'll have to split in 1 1/2 years. I bet Apple, Legendary or Netflix will buy WB by that time."
— r/movies user, 219 upvotes
Further down, another user predicted that DC, HBO and the rest would be sold off "for parts", and a third followed the logic to its darkest corner: "New nightmare scenario unlocked: Disney buys DC after Skydance sells everything off piecemeal." Netflix, for the record, already lost Warner Bros. to this exact bidder once.
Nobody at Skydance has announced a sale, and the official line runs the other way. David Ellison plans to fold Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single service "over time", insists "HBO should stay HBO", and back in March the company ruled out selling or spinning off its cable networks. That promise covers the cable channels. Not DC, not the film library.
What comes next
The first quarterly report as Skydance Corp will show how fast the cuts are landing. If the savings arrive and the stock recovers towards $12, the warrants turn into cash and the break-up talk cools off. If not, the cheapest way to pay down $79 billion is to find someone who wants a superhero universe more than Skydance needs the interest bill.
DC has had one new owner this month. The debt suggests it might not be the last.
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