The battle over WBD left three big winners on Wall Street—while the thousands who lost out will remain behind the scenes

The battle between Netflix and Paramount over the fate of Warner Bros. Discovery has concluded with a decidedly odd outcome: Everybody won. At least that’s Wall Street’s opinion on the saga.

It all began last December when WBD agreed to sell its Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max streaming service to the streaming giant Netflix. Days later, Paramount Skydance lobbed in a hostile bid to buy all of WBD. Amid multiple twists and turns—and the CEOs of both bidding companies separately visiting President Trump to make their cases—WBD declared on Feb. 26 that it would agree to Paramount’s bid, which had gone through various permutations to make it more appealing. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos declined to sweeten the offer, saying that for Netflix the deal had always been nice-to-have, not need-to-have.

Such a public battle could have left everyone involved bruised. But investors seem to have decided that no one lost, rewarding all three companies. Least surprising was the 12% leap in Netflix’s stock price on news of the deal. Wall Street had thought all along that WBD was an overpriced acquisition. (Netflix would have paid $83 billion to WBD.) Investors were ...