With Warner Bros seemingly out of the picture, Paramount could be closer to finding a merger partner.

The Wall Street Journal reports the entertainment giant has paused talks with all suitors for 30 days to focus on negotiations with Skydance, which has been in talks with the company for some time.

Among the bids Paramount has paused was one from private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which submitted a $26 billion all-cash offer.

Skydance, David Ellison’s media company, has had a longstanding partnership with Paramount Pictures to coproduce and cofinance films. The company reportedly made a preliminary offer in January to buy out Shari Redstone’s stake of National Amusements, the family holding company that controls Paramount Global.

The terms of that deal have reportedly been worked out (but not announced), says the Journal, but Skydance is insisting it be allowed to merge the studios, which requires permissions from an independent committee of directors.

(National Amusements controls about 80% of Paramount Global’s voting stock, but since the company is publicly traded, these steps are required.)

That committee agreed to forgo all other offer discussions, including Apollo’s, after reportedly having concerns about Apollo’s ability to put together the funds to back its offer.

Ellison is backed by Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital, KKR, and his father, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison.

Skydance is said to be primarily interested in the Paramount Pictures studio and would likely look to divest other interests. That leaves the fate of holdings including CBS, MTV, and the Paramount+ streaming service uncertain.

Skydance has been an increasingly strong presence in Hollywood the past several years, producing blockbuster films including Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, and Transformers: Rise of the Beast.

Paramount stock surged initially on the news, but was down nearly 8% in midday trading. Year to date, shares are down 13.5%.

Should Skydance work out a deal to purchase Paramount and Redstone’s shares, it would be a seismic shift for the company, which was built by Sherri Redstone’s father, Sumner Redstone, who died in 2020.

Redstone had resisted a sale previously, hoping the company’s numbers would improve and the streaming service would find traction. So far, that hasn’t happened. At the end of the fourth quarter last year, Paramount+ reported a subscriber base of about 67.5 million users. Netflix, by comparison, had more than 260 million in that same period.

And last week, things took a turn for the worse when S&P downgraded Paramount’s debt to junk, citing “accelerating declines” in its traditional TV business and continued uncertainty about the streaming unit.

Paramount has attracted a good bit of media attention since it announced it had hired financial advisors to consider bids. For a long period of time, it appeared Warner Bros. Discovery would acquire the company; but in February, the company went “pencils down” on the deal as it saw its own shares fall.

Byron Allen offered $14.3 billion for Paramount Global at one point, but that bid has gone fairly silent of late.