Paramount closes the $110 billion Warner deal and lists the parent as Skydance
Paramount Skydance completed the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday. The combined company is called Skydance, with David Ellison as chair and chief executive and Ynon Kreiz as co-chief executive. Class B shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange as SKYD. The company puts annual revenue near $70 billion.
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Paramount Skydance closed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday, and the parent company that came out of the close is called Skydance. The price on the deal, as reported by The Washington Post and TechCrunch, is $110 billion. Class B shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SKYD. The company says the combined business has annual revenue of nearly $70 billion.
David Ellison is chairman and chief executive. Ynon Kreiz, who previously ran Mattel, is co-chief executive. A memo from the two, obtained by the Post, said the corporate parent would take the Skydance name and that the Paramount and Warner Bros. studio names and marks would stay: the mountain, and the shield.
What sits inside the new company
The close puts two film and television studios, two streaming services, and a cable and broadcast portfolio under one board. Paramount and Warner Bros. are the studios. Paramount+ and HBO Max are the streamers. The network list cited in the close reports includes CBS, CNN, MTV, TBS, Comedy Central and Food Network. Franchises named in the same reports include The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, the DC characters, and Yellowstone.
CBS News stays under Bari Weiss, who was made editor in chief last year. The Post noted the argument that appointment has drawn. The close does not change her title. It does put CNN and CBS News in the same corporate group, which is the news-side fact of Tuesday, separate from the studio fact.
How the price was reached
The path to Tuesday ran through a losing bidder. Paramount announced in February that it would buy Warner Bros. Discovery after a contest with Netflix. Netflix had earlier reached an agreement to buy the film and television studios and the streaming business, and to leave the cable networks out. Paramount's bid covered the whole company. To get there, Paramount added cash for shareholders if the close slipped past a deadline, and it agreed to cover the breakup fee Warner Bros. Discovery would owe Netflix for walking away from that earlier deal.
The legal path closed more recently. TechCrunch reported that settlements with a group of US states and with a Hollywood writers' union removed the main obstacles still in court. State attorneys general had been part of the fight the Post described as months of wrangling. With those settlements done, the merger took effect on 6 October.
The number that is not a strategy
$110 billion is the transaction figure in the close stories. Nearly $70 billion is the revenue figure the company is using for the combined group. Neither number says how the two streaming services will be sold, whether as one app or two, or what happens to overlapping film slates. Ellison called the day historic for the industry in a statement carried by TechCrunch. The operational questions sit underneath that line.
The name choice is a smaller but concrete decision. Skydance was the Ellison company that bought Paramount and then used that vehicle to buy Warner. Keeping Skydance as the parent, and Paramount and Warner Bros. as the studio marks, splits the corporate identity from the audience identity. Viewers will still see the mountain and the shield. Traders will look up SKYD. Staff have been told, in the memo, that this is the arrangement.
The close also ends the period in which Netflix was the contracted buyer of the studio and streaming piece. That contract is what the breakup fee was attached to. Paying it, or agreeing to pay it, was part of the cost of moving the asset from one buyer to the other. The fee itself was not restated in the Tuesday close stories. The fact that it had to be covered is.
What Tuesday does not settle is the regulatory afterlife. A settlement with states is not the same as a judgment that the combination raises no competition problem in theatrical distribution, in sports rights, or in news. It means those states agreed to stop blocking the close. The company that starts trading as SKYD now has to run CBS and CNN, HBO Max and Paramount+, and two feature studios, under one pair of chief executives, with a revenue base it puts at nearly $70 billion.
