How the Skydance Merger Will Remake Hollywood and the News Business
The Ellison family’s $110 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery means more top-down control, and less room for dissent.
By Ben Schwartz
No, Frodo did not throw the ring into Mt. Doom in time. Ethan Hunt did not get to the top of the Eiffel Tower to defuse the bomb. A lone X-Wing Fighter did not blow up the Death Star.
This is all to say that, despite the best efforts of the Writers Guild of America, 12 states attorneys general, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, and thousands worried about job security—despite a months-long initiative to stop it—the Skydance merger with Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery closed this Tuesday. The Empire struck back, and the Empire won.
To recap: the Trump-aligned Ellison family now owns Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., HBO, CBS, Paramount+, CBS News, 60 Minutes, and CNN. To fund this behemoth, they took on a $80 billion debt load. How will they repay it? By laying off many people and consolidating services. Disney laid off nearly 4,000 people in 2019 to help pay for its buyout of 21st Century Fox to compete with Netflix. With a far larger merger backed by even bigger loans, a huge wave of job losses is coming to Los Angeles.
The machinations of billionaires in the entertainment industry may seem distant to Hollywood's audience, but here’s one thing that will affect them: soon after the deal closed, it was announced that Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy, the executives who brought three Warner Bros. films to Oscar consideration last year—Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Weapons—have been fired.
As Deluca and Abdy exited the building, Paramount also announced an eighth Transformers movie with Michael Bay returning as director and Steven Spielberg as producer. An $80 billion debt load means less risk-taking on new ideas. But Hollywood’s new Skydance overlords won't need them: their company is home to DC Studios, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter universe (and all the anti-trans toxicity she brings), Looney Tunes, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Lord of the Rings, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and Top Gun. The future of movies looks clear as day. As Tom Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu put it, "We are living in a new era."