On Wall Street, speculation is often the sincerest form of flattery.
That’s what the media and entertainment sector experienced in 2025, with Warner Bros Discovery shares surging 170% due to investor theorizing about the upside of the company’s acquisition by either Netflix or Paramount. EchoStar, meanwhile, started the year by merging with sister company Dish Network and ended it with its stock on a tear, up 370% for the year, due to a deal upping its stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX. (Speculation has been widespread that SpaceX could go public in 2026 in what could be the biggest IPO in history.)
Those are only the biggest winners, of course. On the other side of the coin, Comcast shares slumped 20% amid concerns about its stagnating broadband business. Angel Studios, the Sound of Freedom distributor that went public last September, saw its shares plunge 53% from that point, with other big declines registered by Trump Media & Technology Group, movie theater giant AMC Entertainment, digital publisher BuzzFeed and right-wing social media firm Rumble.
Not quite making the chart but leaving an impression on the marketplace were Charter Communications (-39%) and Terrifier 3 distributor Cineverse, which slipped 44%. Spotify, Roku and Reddit registered gains of between 25% and 45%.
Along with Angel, other new ticker symbols joined the establishment over the past year, with Lionsgate executing a long-in-development split. The transaction created a new public entity for the company’s film and TV studio as well as a new stock for Starz. The latter had one of the best performances in the sector, rising 45% since its debut last spring.
Paramount, which is a reconstituted company with a new ticker symbol after last summer’s merger with Skydance, jumped 28% as investors processed the depth of its resources amid the WBD chase. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and one of the richest people in the world, is a key financial backer of Paramount and the proposal to acquire WBD.
Among the other comings and goings: pay-TV and broadband provider Altice USA rebranded as Optimum, changing its ticker symbol. And ad agency giant Interpublic and ad tech firm Innovid were both acquired, leading to their stocks to stop trading.
One noteworthy fact about the year in stocks is that Apple and Amazon, tech giants with significant relevance to the entertainment sector, notched only single-digit gains. That progress was far more limited than the leaps forward by Nvidia (+39%) and other players in the AI race, which drove stock markets to new records. Google and YouTube parent Alphabet was one exception, making Deadline’s ranking of top gainers (+65%), due to traction by its Gemini AI platform and continued momentum for YouTube’s ad business.
Among the other entertainment giants, Netflix and Disney also both registered single-digit gains, rising 5% and 2%, respectively. Netflix last fall set a 10-for-1 split of its shares, with the goal of making its highflying stock more affordable.
The local TV sector saw a halo effect from repeated pronouncement from government officials, industry trade groups and executives that the longtime cap on station ownership would soon be eliminated. Nexstar, which has a pending deal to acquire rival Tegna, saw its stock gain 30% on the year, with smaller competitors E.W. Scripps and Gray Media also jumping (140% and 55%, respectively). Sinclair, whose unsolicited bid for Scripps was rebuffed, gave back 5% on the year.
