LOS ANGELES– Paramount’s Warner Bros. subsidiary closed on Tuesday. The primary emphasis of Skydance, the new entertainment giant resulting from its $81 billion acquisition of Discovery, will be continuity.
For now, it will showcase its expanding suite of intellectual properties, with the official announcement declaring “a portfolio of franchises ranging from Top Gun and Harry Potter to White Lotus and SpongeBob SquarePants.”
Several such lists can be made without any overlap. Tony Soprano is now under the same roof as Michael Corleone. The works of JRR Tolkien and Taylor Sheridan now share the same home. And the DC Universe is in the same space as “Star Trek.”
Both companies have a storied history, some recent, of non-franchise creations whose creators are worried about what they will be left with while much of Hollywood fears for their jobs and productions.
While moviegoers and TV viewers may wonder what all the fuss is about in the short term, they may not be able to see what remains in the long term.
Let’s take a look at what film and television consumption and production will look like in the near future.
The streaming services that give viewers the most direct interface with the two merged companies — HBO Max for Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount+ for Paramount — will look the same on Wednesday as they did on Tuesday, but they won’t stay that way.
In its announcement of the completed deal, Skydance, echoing what CEO David Ellison had previously told shareholders, said the two broadcasters “will be combined into a single service over time.” No timeline was given.
The classic broadcast and cable properties owned by the two companies that feed those services (HBO, TNT, HGTV and Food Network for Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS, MTV, BET and Nickelodeon for Paramount) shouldn’t show any evidence of near-term change either, but that doesn’t mean major upheaval isn’t coming.
While the total number of subscribers for the two services is more than 200 million, it’s not entirely clear how much overlap there is between the two. HBO Max’s share in this is almost twice that of Paramount +. This could have an impact on the branding of the upcoming chimera, and Warner Bros. Part of the HBO Max name, which Discovery previously tried to drop in favor of just Max, may survive.
“I don’t believe the consumer will notice the difference in organization, whether it’s an increase in HBO Max subscription fees, whether it’s an increase in Paramount+ subscription fees, whether it’s new programs being introduced in the first quarter,” said J. Christopher Hamilton, a professor at the SI Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. “I think it’s going to take some time for them to really, really focus on what changes to implement that will be the least disruptive to the consumer base and also to the town.”
For each streamer, the pipelines continued pumping as if no major changes were going to happen.
Warner Bros. The biggest TV piece coming up for is the Harry Potter reboot; The Christmas premiere of Season 1 is on HBO Max, and filming for Season 2 is already underway, regardless of the streamer’s name at the time of release.
Season 3 of “The Pitt,” which won the best drama Emmy award in each of its first two seasons, is in full swing and is scheduled to premiere in early 2027. “The White Lotus” will finally complete the shooting of Season 4, which will last for months on the French Riviera, to be released next year.
Filming for the second season of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” has been completed and its episodes are planned to air in early 2027. Filming of the fourth and final season of House of the Dragon, the other sequel to Game of Thrones, will begin in the new year.
Paramount+’s lineup is dominated by Sheridan’s many western-coded works; Many spin-offs, prequels and sequels to “Landman,” “Tulsa King” and “Yellowstone” are coming soon.
A big change is inevitable: Sheridan’s contract ends in 2028, and he’ll head to NBCUniversal then.
Last week, Paramount announced two franchises in development: a GI Joe movie starring Bradley Cooper, directed by Danny McBride, and a live-action Transformers movie executive produced and creatively styled by Steven Spielberg.
Over the past dozen-plus years, Paramount’s slate has been heavily weighted toward franchise fare, whether it’s “Mission: Impossible,” “Star Trek,” “Sonic the Hedgehog” or any of the other major franchises in its arsenal.
Although the studio won a number of best picture awards in the 1990s, including “Forrest Gump,” “Braveheart” and “Titanic,” there has been a bit of a drought since then (broken only by 2007’s “No Country for Old Men,” which Paramount distributed internationally).
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. has hit a hot streak with its combination of original and franchise films. This year, under the direction of Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, they collected 30 Oscar nominations and won 11 awards, including best picture for “One Battle After Another.”
By consolidating the two-story studios, “we’re not rewriting history — we’re equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine,” Ellison wrote in a post on X last week.
But neither Abdy nor De Luca will be part of the combined operation that stunned filmmakers like Tony Gilroy. Gilroy called their exit “a seismic shift in Hollywood of a magnitude I don’t remember,” adding: “They’re just real movie people. And these studios are real studios. There’s no reason for them to be merged or broken up.”
Paramount Motion Picture co-chairmen Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg will now oversee Skydance’s overall film operation. James Gunn and Peter Safran are expected to continue running DC Studios.
Skydance will also include Warner Bros.’ The newest private label is Clockwork, headed by former NEON executive Christian Parkes. The company was founded to support independent projects, both in-house produced and purchased; among them “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker’s latest film, “Ti Amo!” and future productions including Park Chan-wook’s Matthew McConaughey and Pedro Pascal film “The Brigands of Rattlecreek.”
Theatrical exhibition lives or dies by a strong release schedule, and the promise of “at least 30 high-quality theatrical releases” per year will likely appeal to attendees. Next year, the combined studios could surpass that number with 36 releases, including the Superman sequel, the Minecraft sequel and “A Quiet Place Part III.”
North American theater owners have reinvested nearly $2.7 billion in their theaters in the past two years, according to a report from the trade association Cinema United. The domestic box office is healthy right now, up about 19.5% from last year, and is expected to surpass $8 billion this week.
The combined company is expected to have some big productions on the horizon for the rest of this year, including “Dune: Part Three.”
Michael O’Leary, Cinema United’s president and CEO, reiterated last month that their primary goal is to protect movie theaters from the “harms of legacy consolidation,” but the group was encouraged by the consent decree’s language calling for “five years of increased film production, meaningful theatrical exclusivity and broad distribution, prohibitions on cost overruns, and continued access to the Paramount and Warner Bros. catalogs.” These conditions will enable theaters to “adapt and thrive,” O’Leary said.