Warner Bros. Discovery recently reported that they had been receiving unsolicited interests from other companies. This could result in a partial or full purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery subsidiaries.
Being that NetherRealm Studios is a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery through Warner Bros. Games, this could inevitably have an impact on the future of the Mortal Kombat and Injustice franchises.
Rather than rejecting these offers, Warner Bros. Discovery President and CEO David Zaslav confirmed that they are considering potentially selling the company.
“After receiving interest from multiple parties, we have initiated a comprehensive review of strategic alternatives to identify the best path forward to unlock the full value of our assets,” said Zaslav on the matter.
According to Variety, Warner Bros. Discovery has now set the deadline for first-round, nonbinding bids to November 20, 2025. The board will apparently meet before Thanksgiving to consider the offers laid out.
For now, the three frontrunners are said to be Paramount Skydance, Netflix and Comcast. It’s suggested that Paramount Skydance may wish to acquire all of Warner Bros. Discovery while Netflix and Comcast are only interested in Warner Bros. streaming and studio operations.
Of course, we had previously heard from Sony that they were not interested in acquiring Warner Bros. and instead wish to focus on building their own strengths of anime and games.
Apparently, Warner Bros. had already rejected an offer from Paramount Skydance to sell the company for $23.50 per share. Notably, Warner Bros. Discovery stocks are currently priced at about $23.70 at the time of writing this, but it was only about three months ago that saw the company trading for around $11.60 per share.
NetherRealm Studios recently released Mortal Kombat 1: Definitive Edition. It’s important to consider that whenever NetherRealm Studios releases a “definitive version” of one of their fighting games, it has always marked the end of their post-launch support for that fighter.
Indeed, shortly afterwards, NRS confirmed that they had shifted focus to their next project. Many are speculating that this next project will be the third iteration of the Injustice series considering that Injustice 2 was released back in 2017.
Overall, Warner Bros. Games has had a rough year considering the Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League flop from Rocksteady Studios as well as the closure of Player First Games and MultiVersus servers. This was a sad tale for Player First Studios considering that it hadn’t even been a full year since they were acquired by Warner Bros.
Though Moral Kombat 1 was fairly successful by selling a reported 6.2 million units (which is especially impressive for a fighting game), these numbers have a hard time comparing to Mortal Kombat 11’s 12 million sales. As a result, it’s possible that Warner Bros. Games was projecting better sales from Mortal Kombat 11’s successor.
If a company ends up acquiring the Warner Bros. Games subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery without acquiring the rights to D.C., it could theoretically impact the production of Injustice 3 (assuming that really is NetherRealm Studios’ next project).
However, as previously mentioned, the frontrunners right now are either interested only in acquiring parts of the company that wouldn’t affect NetherRealm Studios at all, or acquiring the entire company. It’s beginning to look like fans of NetherRealm Studios will have little to worry about.
Ultimately though, we’ll have to wait until around the end of the year to learn of the direction in which Warner Bros. Discovery’s board is leaning towards to truly know what’s going to happen.