Next week, Paramount and Warner Bros. will officially merge into one mega studio with a familiar name: Skydance. The deal is expected to be completed on Tuesday.
Announcing the new name at
But Ellison’s Skydance Media has been active since 2006 and has a history of primarily producing franchises, action movies and streaming, although its television lineup is a bit more diverse.
Of course, series like “GI Joe” and “Star Trek” will continue to be a priority for the new studio, but does Skydance’s performance indicate anything about where the new combined studio’s priority will be?
Warner Bros. It seems unlikely that the company will give up on award nominations or that Paramount will give up on romantic comedies. But one thing’s for sure: Ellison specializes in crowd-pleasers, action flicks, and familiar franchises, some of which are decades old.
Skydance earned more than $8.7 billion at the global box office; That’s a healthy profit for a relatively small player. So how will the name evolve from a production team churning out a handful of movies and shows a year into a massive combined operation that Ellison promises will release at least 30 movies a year? If nothing else, Mark Wahlberg probably won’t have to worry about his career prospects for a while.
Here are five takeaways from Skydance Media’s previous films and TV series:
Skydance Plays Favorites
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Skydance plays favorites, and the favorite is unquestionably Tom Cruise. Even if “Mission: Impossible” is shelved (for now), expect more collaborations between the action icon and Ellison. There is already a sequel to “Days of Thunder” in the file. It’s also significant that thousands of Hollywood stars have officially expressed their disdain for the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, but Cruise told “The Pat McAfee Show” that he’s confident Skydance will “keep good” on its promise to revitalize the movie industry. Another Skydance favorite is Mark Wahlberg, who directed two “Planned Parenthood” movies for the studio. Ryan Reynolds is also one of his frequent collaborators; He stars in “Mayday,” “The Adam Project” and “6 Underground.” John Krasinski is a regular on Skydance. He played the titular superspy throughout four seasons of “Jack Ryan” and starred opposite Natalie Portman in “The Fountain of Youth.” The last name to look out for is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He directed two “Terminator” sequels and starred in two seasons of “Fubar” for Skydance.
Skydance is Now an IP Machine
Image Credit: Skydance
One of the most valuable assets Ellison acquired during the merger was Warner Bros. library and their intellectual property was the toy box. DC Studios, “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Game of Thrones,” Looney Tunes and “Scooby-Doo” are now owned by Skydance. Iconic films such as “Blade Runner”, “Goodfellas”, “The Goonies”, “The Matrix”, “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, “Ocean’s 11”, “Vacation” and “Gremlins” are now in the hands of Skydance and they are all ready for use. It’s not hard to imagine any of these properties being rebooted or turned into TV series to start fresh.
Skydance Media was already producing films for franchises such as “Mission: Impossible,” “Top Gun,” “Star Trek” and “Transformers,” and that will certainly play a role in fulfilling Ellison’s 30-film-a-year promise.
Big and Small Screens
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Skydance Media has certainly produced some of the biggest hits at the box office in recent years, from “Top Gun: Maverick” to “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” and “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.”
But Skydance has also focused heavily on streaming movies and their sequels. “Planned Parenthood” put favorite son Wahlberg in a funnier action role and spurred the upcoming “Planned Parenthood 2,” a hit on Apple TV+. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, “The Old Guard” became popular on Netflix and heralded a sequel.
But that doesn’t mean the new Skydance will focus more on streaming than before. The terms of the merger state that Skydance’s wide-release films must have a 45-day theatrical distribution window, and that the company cannot release them on any subscription streaming platform, including Paramount+, for 90 days after their theatrical release.
Action, Action and More Action
Image Credit: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
If you pick a random Skydance movie poster, it will likely feature a bloody movie star holding a gun. Aside from a few early outliers (2010’s “True Grit” and 2012’s “Guilt Trip”), there was always action in the Ellison camp. Skydance apparently fell in love with the genre and its favorite star, Tom Cruise, after the release of “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” in 2011. Just a year later, Skydance and Paramount teamed up again to add Cruise to “Jack Reacher.” In the years that followed, Skydance produced such films as “World War Z,” “GI Joe: Retaliation,” “Star Trek Beyond,” “Baywatch,” “Annihilation” and “Gemini Man.” Skydance’s latest titles include “Mayday,” “The Family Plan 2,” “Fountain of Youth,” “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” “The Gorge” and “Heart of Stone.”
Ellison has repeatedly described himself as a movie fan first and an executive second. It’s also no secret that Skydance’s creative direction is largely in line with their own tastes. In the agreement with the state AGs, Ellison agreed that both Warner Bros. and promised to keep the Paramount lots as separate entities. But as we learned Friday, Paramount film heads Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein will oversee both movie studios. Greenstein came from Sony, but Goldberg has been at Skydance for decades. The question now is: How will they balance the prestigious history of Warner Bros., the studio behind “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “The Shining,” “Goodfellas” and the most recent best picture winner “One Battle After Another,” with Ellison’s crowd-pleasing approach?
Skydance Television: Diverse Selection
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Skydance series such as the wildly popular “Reacher” and its spinoff “Neagley” are extensions of the company’s core Jack Reacher universe. But other series have gone in different directions: “Grace and Frankie,” which ran for seven seasons on Netflix, earned multiple Emmy nominations for its Jane Fonda-Lily Tomlin comedy. Apple TV+ series “Foundation” is an ambitious three-season sci-fi thriller, and action comedy “FUBAR” on Netflix features Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first TV series starring role.
But Skydance Television never quite moved away from the Emmy-winning films produced by Skydance’s new subsidiary, HBO; Therefore, this is likely a hopeful sign that the premium cabler will continue to operate independently.
