Two foes end up on the same team after an unlikely twist of fate. As the drawn-out battle for Sky enters its final weeks, what sounds like the premise for a bad movie may become reality for the Walt Disney Company and Comcast.

Unless one of the American media giants backs down by Saturday, Britain’s Takeover Panel will stage an auction for the pay-TV group. Bidding is already stretched: Comcast’s offer of £14.75 per share, worth £26 billion ($34 billion) overall, would earn the buyer a return on investment of just 6 percent in 2020. Twenty-First Century Fox, parts of which are being absorbed by Disney, has bid £14 per share for the 61 percent of Sky it doesn’t already own.

One outcome is that Disney and Fox put in a knockout offer. The Mouse House wants to launch a streaming-video subscription service to rival Netflix. Sky’s 23 million European subscribers would be the ideal launchpad, and would allow Disney to reclaim the British rights to movies like “Moana.” Its DisneyLife subscription product is flailing in Britain, partly because it has the rights to just 16 of the 55 Disney and Pixar movies released in the last five years, according to Bernstein.