On May 17, 2021, nearly three years after the acquisition, AT&T decided to leave the entertainment business by announcing that it had proposed to sell its ownership of WarnerMedia in a merger with Discovery, Inc. to form a new publicly traded company, Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal closed on April 8, 2022.

As of late February 2026, Netflix is in the final stages of acquiring the studios and streaming divisions of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in a deal valued at approximately $82.7 billion. The definitive agreement was announced on December 5, 2025, and is expected to officially close in the third quarter of 2026. Under the terms of the merger, Netflix will become the owner of Warner Bros. Entertainment, DC Studios, HBO, and the entire library of iconic franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and the DC Universe. As part of the restructuring, WBD’s linear "Global Networks" (the Discovery side) will be spun off into a separate, new publicly-traded company called Discovery Global. While the deal has faced intense regulatory scrutiny and a rival $108 billion "all-cash" counter-bid from Paramount Skydance, the WBD board has endorsed the Netflix offer, which aims to create the world's most dominant "end-to-end" global entertainment and storytelling powerhouse.