No 8-K reporting completion under Item 2.01 was filed by 1 October 2026; Paramount's 30 September 8-K said the court only cleared the way to close, and the companies now plan to close on 6 October.
Hunch. Every other barrier is already gone, the shareholder vote was in April and the last regulator signed off on 17 September, so only paperwork now stands between the settlement and a closing before the daily payment starts.
The October market resolves on the buyer's own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, read on 1 October 2026. It resolves YES if an 8-K from Paramount Skydance or Warner Bros. Discovery reports the merger complete under Item 2.01 with a completion date on or before 1 October 2026, and NO if no such filing exists by the end of that day. If EDGAR cannot be read, the companies' own newsrooms settle it, then reports from Reuters and the Financial Times.
We found ten deals like this since 2004. Each was a large US media or telecom merger where a competition case against it ended in a settlement. We counted the days from the settlement being filed in court to the day the buyer reported the deal complete. We checked whether that took ten days or less, the gap between this settlement and 1 October, when the daily payment starts. We picked the ten cases closest to this one, not the newest. One caution: the Justice Department settled all ten, so the same body set the terms every time.