LOS ANGELES – For Skydance, the entertainment giant created by Paramount’s $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the first priority after Tuesday’s closing will be maintaining continuity.
The newly combined company is already highlighting the depth of its intellectual property, promoting a franchise lineup that stretches from “Top Gun” and “Harry Potter” to “The White Lotus” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
The list barely begins to capture the breadth of the merger. Tony Soprano now shares a corporate home with Michael Corleone, while the worlds created by J.R.R. Tolkien and Taylor Sheridan sit under the same umbrella. The DC Universe, meanwhile, joins “Star Trek” in the expanded portfolio.
Yet both companies also possess a long — and in some cases very recent — record of producing work outside established franchises. The creators behind those projects are increasingly anxious about their prospects as Hollywood braces for widespread job losses and production cuts.
In the immediate future, viewers may struggle to see what the merger changes. Over time, however, the entertainment industry’s new shape could look markedly different.
Here is what the merger could mean for the way movies and television are made, distributed and watched.
What does it mean for TV and streaming?
For viewers, the clearest connection to the merged companies is through their streaming platforms: HBO Max, operated by Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount+. Both services should look unchanged Wednesday from the way they appeared Tuesday, but that stability is expected to be temporary.
In announcing that the deal had closed, Skydance echoed comments CEO David Ellison previously made to shareholders, saying the two platforms “will unify into a single service over time.” The company did not provide a schedule.
The traditional broadcast and cable networks supporting those streaming businesses — including HBO, TNT, HGTV and Food Network at Warner Bros. Discovery, along with CBS, MTV, BET and Nickelodeon at Paramount — are also unlikely to show immediate changes. That, however, does not rule out significant disruption ahead.
Together, HBO Max and Paramount+ serve well over 200 million subscribers, although the companies have not made clear how many customers use both services. HBO Max has nearly twice as many subscribers as Paramount+, a disparity that could shape the branding of the eventual combined platform. The HBO Max name may survive in some form after Warner Bros. Discovery previously moved to replace it with the shorter “Max.”
“I do not believe the consumer is going to observe the difference in the organization, whether it be in raised subscription fees to HBO Max or raised subscription fees to Paramount+ or new programming rolled out in the first quarter,” said J. Christopher Hamilton, a professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “I think it’s going to take some time for them to really, really lock in on what implemented changes will have the least amount of disruption to the consumer base, but also to the town.”
Skydance’s TV lineup includes ‘Pitt,’ ‘Potter,’ ‘Lotus’ and ‘Landman’
For now, programming on both streaming platforms continues to move forward as planned, with production pipelines operating as if the landmark merger were not about to take place.
Warner Bros.’ biggest upcoming television project is its reboot of “Harry Potter.” The first season is scheduled to premiere on HBO Max at Christmas, while production on Season 2 is already underway — even though the name of the service carrying it may change before its release.
Season 3 of “The Pitt,” which won the best drama Emmy for each of its first two seasons, is deep into production and expected to arrive in early 2027. “The White Lotus” is also nearing the end of its months-long Season 4 shoot on the French Riviera, with new episodes due sometime next year.
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” has completed filming on its second season and is scheduled to begin releasing episodes in early 2027. Its fellow “Game of Thrones” spinoff, “House of the Dragon,” is preparing to film its fourth and final season in the new year.
Paramount+ continues to lean heavily on Taylor Sheridan’s many Western-inspired dramas. New seasons of “Landman,” “Tulsa King” and multiple “Yellowstone” spinoffs, prequels and sequels are in the pipeline.
One major shift is already on the horizon: Sheridan’s Paramount contract expires in 2028, after which he is expected to move to NBCUniversal.
What does it mean for the movies?
In the past week, Paramount announced two franchises in development: a G.I. Joe movie with Bradley Cooper, directed by Danny McBride, and a live-action Transformers film, executive produced and creatively shaped by Steven Spielberg.
The Paramount slate has in the past dozen-plus years been heavily weighted toward franchise fare, whether it’s “Mission: Impossible,” “Star Trek,” “Sonic the Hedgehog,” or any of the other big-name brands in its arsenal.
While the studio had a slew of best picture winners in the 1990s, including “Forrest Gump,” “Braveheart” and “Titanic,” it’s been a bit of a drought since (broken only by 2007’s “No Country for Old Men,” which Paramount distributed internationally).
Acclaimed executives are among the early exits
Warner Bros., meanwhile, had been on a hot streak with a combination of original and franchise films. This year, under the stewardship of Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, they collected 30 Oscar nominations and won 11, including best picture for “One Battle After Another.”
Ellison wrote in a post on X last week that by combining the two storied studios, “we aren’t rewriting history — we’re equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine.”
But neither Abdy nor De Luca will be part of the merged operation, which left filmmakers like Tony Gilroy reeling. Gilroy called their exits “a seismic change in Hollywood of a magnitude that I don’t remember,” adding, “They’re just real film people. And these studios are real studios. There’s no reason for them to be merged or pulled apart.”
Paramount Motion Picture co-chairs Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg will lead the overall film operation for Skydance now. James Gunn and Peter Safran are expected to continue running DC Studios.
Skydance will also include Warner Bros.’ newest specialty label, Clockwork, with former NEON executive Christian Parkes remaining its head. The label was established to support independent projects, both produced in-house and acquired, with future releases including “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker’s latest, “Ti Amo!,” and Park Chan-wook’s Matthew McConaughey and Pedro Pascal movie “The Brigands of Rattlecreek.”
What about movie theaters?
Theatrical exhibition lives or dies by a robust release schedule, and the promise of “a minimum of 30 high-quality theatrical films” a year will likely be an appealing one to exhibitors. Next year, the combined studios could exceed that with some 36 releases including a Superman sequel, a Minecraft movie sequel and “A Quiet Place Part III.”
Over the past two years, North American theater owners have reinvested some $2.7 billion in their cinemas, according to a report from the trade association Cinema United. The domestic box office is currently healthy, up around 19.5% from last year and is expected to cross the $8 billion mark this week.
The merged company has some big releases on the horizon for the remainder of this year too, including “Dune: Part Three.”
Cinema United’s president and CEO Michael O’Leary last month reiterated that their primary objective is to safeguard theaters from the “harms of legacy consolidation,” but the group was encouraged by the consent decree’s language on “increased film production for five years, meaningful theatrical exclusivity and wide distribution, prohibitions on cost increases, and continued access to the catalogs of Paramount and Warner Bros.” Those conditions, O’Leary said, will enable theaters to “to adapt and succeed.”
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