Skydance mashes proven properties of Paramount and Warner Bros. into an uncertain Hollywood hybrid

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Continuity will be the immediate emphasis for Skydance, the newly created entertainment behemoth borne of Paramount’s $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery that closed on Tuesday.

For now, it will show off its bulging bundle of intellectual properties, with the official announcement touting “a franchise portfolio spanning Top Gun and Harry Potter to White Lotus and SpongeBob SquarePants.”

Several such lists could be made without any overlap. Tony Soprano is now under the same roof as Michael Corleone. The creations of J.R.R. Tolkien and Taylor Sheridan now share a home. And the DC Universe is in the same space as “Star Trek.”

Both companies also have a storied history — some of it even recent — of non-franchise creations, whose creators are worried about what will be left for them as big swaths of Hollywood fear for their jobs and productions.

Moviegoers and TV viewers may wonder what all the fuss was about in the short run, while in the long run they may not recognize the landscape that’s left.

Here’s a look at how the consumption and production of film and television will look in the near future.

What does it mean for TV and streaming?

The streaming services that provide the most direct interface viewers have with the two merged companies — HBO Max for Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount+ for Paramount — will look the same Wednesday as they did 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 streamers “will unify into a single service over time.” No timeline was given.

The classic broadcast and cable properties the two companies own that feed those services — HBO, TNT, HGTV, and Food Network for Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS, MTV, BET and Nickelodeon for Paramount — should also show no short-term evidence of change, but that won’t mean major upheaval isn’t coming.

Combined, the two services have well over 200 million subscribers, though it’s not wholly clear how much overlap there is between the two. HBO Max’s share of that is nearly double that of Paramount+. That could have an effect on the branding of the chimera to come, and some of the HBO Max name — which Warner Bros. Discovery previously tried to drop in favor of just Max — could live on.

“I do not believe the consumer is going to observe the difference in the organization, whether it be in raised subscription fees to HBO Max or raised subscription fees to Paramount+ or new programming rolled out in the first quarter,” said J. Christopher Hamilton, a professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. “I think it’s going to take some time for them to really, really lock in on what implemented changes will have the least amount of disruption to the consumer base, but also to the town.”

Skydance TV slate includes ‘Pitt,’ ‘Potter,’ ‘Lotus’ and ‘Landman’

The pipelines for each streamer have kept pumping as though no massive change was coming.

The biggest forthcoming piece of TV for Warner Bros. is its Harry Potter reboot, with a Christmas premiere for Season 1 on HBO Max and Season 2 shooting already underway for whatever its streamer is called when it drops.

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, and “The White Lotus” is set to finally complete its monthslong shooting of Season 4 on the French Riviera with a release sometime next year.

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” has wrapped shooting its second season and is slated to start rolling out episodes early in 2027, and the fourth and final season of its fellow “Game of Thrones” scion “House of the Dragon” is set to start shooting in the new year.

Paramount+’s slate is dominated by the many cowboy-coded creations of Sheridan, with new seasons forthcoming on “Landman,” “Tulsa King” and several of the spinoffs, prequels and sequels of his “Yellowstone.”

One major change is inevitable: Sheridan’s contract runs out in 2028, when he’ll be off to NBCUniversal.

What does it mean for the movies?

In the past week, Paramount announced two franchises in development: a G.I. Joe movie with Bradley Cooper, directed by Danny McBride, and a live-action Transformers film, executive produced and creatively shaped by Steven Spielberg.

The Paramount slate has in the past dozen-plus years been heavily weighted toward franchise fare, whether it’s “Mission: Impossible,” “Star Trek,” “Sonic the Hedgehog,” or any of the other big-name brands in its arsenal.

While the studio had a slew of best picture winners in the 1990s, including “Forrest Gump,” “Braveheart” and “Titanic,” it’s been a bit of a drought since.

Acclaimed executives are among the early exits

Warner Bros., meanwhile, had been on a hot streak with a combination of original and franchise films. This year, under the stewardship of Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, they collected 30 Oscar nominations and won 11, including best picture for “One Battle After Another.”

Ellison wrote in a post on X last week that by combining the two storied studios, “we aren’t rewriting history — we’re equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine.”

But neither Abdy nor De Luca will be part of the merged operation, which left filmmakers like Tony Gilroy reeling. Gilroy called their exits “a seismic change in Hollywood of a magnitude that I don’t remember,” adding, “They’re just real film people. And these studios are real studios. There’s no reason for them to be merged or pulled apart.”

Paramount Motion Picture co-chairs Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg will lead the overall film operation for Skydance now. James Gunn and Peter Safran are expected to continue running DC Studios.

“I think everyone’s really happy that the uncertainty, at least in some elements, is over and we get to focus on doing the work,” Safran told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “Thankfully James and I get to keep telling the big story that we want to tell with the resources and support that we need.”

Asked how Skydance might change the direction in which DC is headed, Safran said, “As far as we can tell, not at all. David Ellison was like, ‘I just want you to keep doing what you’re doing.’ ”

Skydance will also include Warner Bros.’ newest specialty label, Clockwork, with former NEON executive Christian Parkes remaining its head. The label was established to support independent projects, both produced in-house and acquired, with future releases including “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker’s latest, “Ti Amo!,” and Park Chan-wook’s Matthew McConaughey and Pedro Pascal movie “The Brigands of Rattlecreek.”

What about movie theaters?

Theatrical exhibition lives or dies by a robust release schedule, and the promise of “a minimum of 30 high-quality theatrical films” a year will likely be an appealing one to exhibitors. Next year, the combined studios could exceed that with some 36 releases including a Superman sequel, a Minecraft movie sequel and “A Quiet Place Part III.”

Over the past two years, North American theater owners have reinvested some $2.7 billion in their cinemas, according to a report from the trade association Cinema United. The domestic box office is currently healthy, up around 19.5% from last year and is expected to cross the $8 billion mark this week.

The merged company has some big releases on the horizon for the remainder of this year too, including “Dune: Part Three.”

Cinema United’s president and CEO Michael O’Leary last month reiterated that their primary objective is to safeguard theaters from the “harms of legacy consolidation,” but the group was encouraged by the consent decree’s language on “increased film production for five years, meaningful theatrical exclusivity and wide distribution, prohibitions on cost increases, and continued access to the catalogs of Paramount and Warner Bros.”

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Associated Press writers Jake Coyle in New York and Alicia Rancilio in Detroit contributed.