Now under the leadership of Skydance CEO David Ellison, the new Paramount is cutting a decidedly different profile from the former Paramount Global. Its new operating model is to move fast and spend lavishly to transform the company into one of the industry’s leading media conglomerates. Make room, Disney, take note, Netflix, and sit back in your chair, Amazon, and Apple.
After the U.S. Federal Trade Commission relented and approved the merger, the long-awaited combination of Skydance and Paramount took effect. Ellison and his executive team went on a multi-stop media tour to lay out the company’s direction, announcing commitments from high-profile filmmakers and stars to new movie projects, TV series, and big-ticket broadcast deals for sports programming with the Ultimate Fighter Championship (UFC). These “wins” are both impressive and expensive, with Paramount outbidding some of Hollywood’s biggest studios to obtain the rights.
Now comes a series of reports that Paramount is preparing a bid to purchase rival studio and broadcaster Warner Bros. Discovery, leveraging the nearly limitless financial resources of David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, the founder and chairman of the tech giant Oracle.
The senior Ellison has just passed Elon Musk to become the richest man in the world, riding a wave of successful investments in Artificial Intelligence. As Musk, Bezos, and others have shown, it is increasingly common to leverage success and riches earned in technology to take over a leading position in media and entertainment.
Some worry that the consolidation of Paramount and Warner Bros. would result in mass layoffs at the core of the industry, and a reduction in the number of movies and TV series created each year from the combined studio. That seems to have been the outcome of Disney’s 2019 acquisition of the studio assets of 20th Century Fox.
The question is, would the IP that is currently held by Warner Bros. studios be better managed under an independent WB, or as part of a greater Paramount operation? The optimists see the potential for Skydance to pour new investment into the studio to create more content, not less. In other words, Skydance’s maneuvers could be a play for long-term growth, rather than a cost-cutting exercise to reach near-term profitability.
See also: Paramount Skydance Prepares Ellison-Backed Bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (Wall Street Journal) and Sizing Up A Possible Paramount-WBD Merger, Hollywood Wonders If This Episode Is A Repeat (Deadline)
