If you look at some of the biggest recent mergers and acquisitions in the world of entertainment, media, and sports, from the record $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts to the merger of Skydance and Paramount to the dueling offers for Warner Bros. Discovery, you’ll notice that the same few names pop up over and over again, often lumped together in the same deals. They are investment firms with names like RedBird Capital Partners, Raine Group, LionTree Advisors, and Silver Lake. Most firms provide financing for these huge deals, but some, like Moelis & Company, are pure advisors who help structure and execute the financing.
If you don’t work in or near the shiny trenches of high finance, you may be asking yourself, “What the hell is going on?”
“When you work with artists, movies, and music, it’s driven by relationships like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” explains Angelo Rufino, who works in the same discipline and ethos as these young companies as head of special situations at 41-year-old Bain Capital. “Who you are and what you can bring to the table is so important, and I think that sometimes gets lost in larger companies.”
Corporate M&A used to be decades old, even a century and a half old, and dominated by Wall Street giants with trillions of dollars in assets under management. Then came the 2008 financial crisis, which caused huge losses and pushed some companies to the brink of bankruptcy and forced others (such as Lehman Brothers) into extinction. Survivors such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were forced to transform into bank holding companies to gain access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window lending program and deposit insurance, and were subject to tighter government oversight.
The challenges faced by old giants have been exacerbated by post-crisis federal regulations (through Dodd-Frank and the Volcker Rule). The regulation targeted speculative trading that created conflicts of interest with clients and required higher asset-to-liability ratios for leveraged investments. As a result, the most aggressive strategies were no longer legal or profitable enough to pursue on a large scale, making way for small, nimble private equity-powered companies led by ambitious refugees from money-center banks.
Many of these upstarts have carved out niches in showbiz. According to Carlos Jimenez, Managing Director of Moelis & Company, the reason is very simple. “Because no one gets tired of talking about media, sports and entertainment,” he says.
That’s especially true in 2025, when Hollywood’s most talked-about drama wasn’t one on the big or small screen, but Skydance Media’s on-again, off-again, and finally Redbird-backed $8.4 billion merger with Paramount.
RedBird founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale said the deal wasn’t necessarily the emotional roller coaster it seemed.
“To some extent, it was business as usual,” said Cardinale, who left Goldman Sachs in 2012 and launched Redbird two years later. “Obviously, this was a very complex deal, and in some ways we had to make three acquisitions. (But) what has defined us in our 35 years (in business) is that we’re persistent, we’re tenacious and we don’t get emotional about these things.”
Nevertheless, Cardinale agrees that this investment is extremely important, both personally and financially. This will give his company Redbird 22.5% voting rights in the newly formed Paramount Skydance Company and a seat on Cardinale’s board of directors. This puts him in second place behind Skydance Media founder David Ellison, who holds the title of chairman and CEO, and his father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, who together control 77.5% of the voting power.
“I considered a lot of things and communicated that,” Cardinale says. “And what changed it for me was having a true owner-manager like David Ellison.”
This isn’t the first time the New York-based power broker has taken the reins of Paramount. In 1966, Austrian-born Charles Bludoorn’s auto parts manufacturing and sales conglomerate Gulf + Western bought the struggling studio, ushering in a golden era that would eventually produce such classics as the “Godfather” movies and “Chinatown.”
Unlike Blue Dawn, Cardinale is not a newcomer to Hollywood. As he’s quick to point out, this isn’t the only significant showbiz investment Redbird has made in recent years. In 2021, he was part of a consortium that bought a significant minority stake in LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s media and entertainment company SpringHill Company, and the following year invested at least $100 million in Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company Artists Equity. The company has also been active in sports, making bets such as paying $750 million for a minority stake in Fenway Sports in 2021 and $1.3 billion to fully acquire AC Milan in 2022. More importantly, the company has been investing in Skydance since 2019.
“Redbird is, to some extent, an intellectual property monetization engine,” Cardinale said. “We have a long track record of being able to acquire IP-based businesses and effectively take them on, revitalize them and reposition them for the 21st century for technological disintermediation.” This removes middlemen from the supply chain and enables more efficient and profitable direct-to-consumer trading.
On the investment side, the results are clear. The company that invests the money takes ownership. But what do these firms get for their advisory services?Typically, advisors collect a retainer fee ($10,000 to $50,000 per month) and a performance fee (1.5% to 10% of the deal amount), with larger deals having more retainers but a lower percentage of performance fees. With mega-deals like the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery receiving dueling offers of up to $108.4 billion from Netflix and Paramount, the worst pieces of the deal pie can’t help but be impressive.
And what do companies get from advisors?
“We basically do two or three things,” Jimenez explains. “We work hard to help our clients with their most important transactions, typically M&A when people are looking to buy or sell. We also raise debt capital or raise capital for initial public offerings. And we also do restructuring work. , it helps when things go awry,” he says, pointing to the work Maurice has done at AMC Theaters, including advising on a $600 million strategic investment from Silver Lake in 2018. 2020 Reorganization Strategy. “If you ask (AMC Chairman and CEO) Adam Aron, he will tell you that we were instrumental in keeping the company afloat during a really tough period of the pandemic,” he says.
Mr. Moelis served as an advisor on Skydance’s merger with Paramount, then advised Netflix on its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, but soon received a hostile offer from the company he had just helped found. The Rain Group also advised Skydance on the merger (along with BofA Securities and, of course, Redbird), while LionTree and Rothschild & Company advised Paramount, along with Centerview Partners, which advised Paramount’s board of directors’ independent special committee.
But when you unpack these deals, Jimenez says, things tend to be a little less crowded than they appear to outsiders.
On large deals, “there’s often so much to do in a short period of time that you need a lot of help, but that’s not always the case,” he says. “In some transactions, even large ones, there may only be one or two banks on each side.”
