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LOS ANGELES — Continuity will be an immediate priority for Skydance, the entertainment event newly created by Paramount’s $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery which closed on Tuesday.
For now, it will showcase the bulging portfolio of intellectual properties, with the official announcement touting “a license portfolio spanning Top Gun and Harry Potter to White Lotus and SpongeBob SquarePants.”
Several such lists could be made without overlapping. Tony Soprano is now under the same roof as Michael Corleone. The creations of JRR Tolkien and Taylor Sheridan now share a home. And the DC Universe is in the same place as “Star Trek.”
Both companies also have an interesting history – some of it even recent – of non-franchise creations, and the creators are worried about what will be left to them as large pieces of Hollywood fear for their work and productions.
Filmgoers and TV viewers may wonder what the fuss was all about in the short term, and in the long term they may not recognize the landscape that remains.
Here’s a look at how film and television consumption and production will look in the near future.
The streaming services that will provide viewers with the most direct interface with the two combined companies – HBO Max for Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount + for Paramount – watch the same Wednesday as Tuesday, but they won’t stay that way.
In its announcement of the completed deal, echoing what CEO David Ellison previously told shareholders, Skydance said the two streams will “merge into one service over time.” No timetable was given.
The classic broadcast and cable properties owned by the two companies that feed these services – HBO, TNT, HGTV, and the Food Network for Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS, MTV, BET and Nickelodeon for Paramount – any short-term evidence of change has shown, but that doesn’t mean big upheaval isn’t coming.
Together, the two services have more than 200 million subscribers, although it’s not entirely clear how much overlap there is between the two. HBO Max’s share of that is nearly double that of Paramount+. That could affect the branding of the chimera to come, and some of the name HBO Max – which Warner Bros. tried. Discovery previously to drop for only Max – to survive.
“I don’t believe that the consumer is going to see the difference in the group, whether it’s in increased subscription fees to HBO Max or increased subscription fees to Paramount + or new programs that were distributed in the first season,” said J. Christopher Hamilton, a professor at the SI Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University. “I think it will take some time for them to really get into what changes that have been implemented will cause the least amount of disruption to the user base, but also to the city.”
The pipes for each streamer have continued to pump as if no major change was coming.
The biggest piece of upcoming TV for Warner Bros. his Harry Potter reboot, with a Christmas preview for season 1 on HBO Max and season 2 shooting has already begun on whatever his streamer will be called when it falls.
Season 3 of “The Pitt,” which won best drama Emmys for each of its first two seasons, is well underway and set for an early 2027 release, while “The White Lotus” is set to wrap up its months-long Season 4 shoot on the French Riviera with a release sometime next year.
“Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” has finished shooting its second season and is expected to begin airing episodes in early 2027, while the fourth and final season of its conspiracy “Game of Thrones” “House of the Dragon” is expected to begin shooting in the new year.
The Paramount + slate is dominated by Sheridan’s many cowboy code creations, with upcoming new seasons of “Landman,” “Tulsa King” and several of his “Yellowstone” spinoffs, prequels and sequels.
One big change is inevitable: Sheridan’s contract runs out in 2028, when he’s off to NBCUniversal.
In the past week, Paramount announced two franchises in development: a GI Joe movie starring Bradley Cooper, directed by Danny McBride, and a live-action Transformers movie produced and creatively designed by Steven Spielberg.
The Paramount slate in the last dozen plus years has been heavily geared toward franchise fare, whether it’s “Mission: Impossible,” “Star Trek,” “Sonic the Hedgehog,” or any of the other big brands in the arsenal.
While the studio had several best picture winners in the 1990s, including “Forrest Gump,” “Braveheart” and “Titanic,” it has been on a drought since then (broken only by 2007’s “No Country for Old Men,” which was released internationally).
Warner Bros., meanwhile, had been on a hot streak with a mix of original and franchise films. This year, under the direction of Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, they collected 30 nominations for Oscar and won 11, including the best picture for “One Battle After Another”.
Ellison wrote in a post on X last week that by combining the two studios with a story, “we’re not rewriting history — we’re equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine.”
But neither Abdy nor De Luca will be part of the combined work, which left filmmakers like Tony Gilroy reeling. Gilroy called their departure “a big change in Hollywood of a magnitude I can’t remember,” adding, “They’re real movie people. And these studios are real studios. There’s no reason to merge them or take them away.”
Paramount Motion Picture co-chairmen Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg will now oversee Skydance’s entire film operations. It is expected that James Gunn and Peter Safran will continue to run DC Studios.
Skydance will also include Warner Bros.’ latest exclusive label, Clockwork, with former NEON boss Christian Parkes still at the helm. The label was established to support independent projects, both in-house and acquired, with future releases including Sean Baker’s latest “Anora” filmmaker “Ti Amo!,” and Park Chan-wook’s Matthew McConaughey and the Pedro Pascal film “The Brigands of Rattlecreek.”
A theatrical show lives or dies on a strong release schedule, and the promise of “at least 30 high-quality theatrical films” a year is likely to appeal to exhibitors. Next year, the combined studios could surpass that with about 36 releases including the Superman series, the Minecraft movie series and “A Quiet Place Part III.”
Over the past two years, North American theater owners have reinvested approximately $2.7 billion in their cinemas, 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 expected to cross the $8 billion mark this week.
The combined company also has big releases on the horizon for the rest of this year, including “Dune: Part Three.”
Cinema United president and CEO Michael O’Leary stressed last month that their primary goal is to protect theaters from “legacy consolidation harm,” but the group was encouraged by the language of the consent decree on “excess film production for five years, a meaningful theatrical and wide distribution ban, a ban on cost increases, and continued access to the Paramount and Warner Bros. catalogs. Those conditions, O’Leary said, will allow with theaters of “change and success.”
