The long-gestating merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed Tuesday, yielding a new major player in media.
Shares in the combined company, Skydance, will start trading later in the day on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have been discontinued on the Nasdaq.
The closing brings to an end a year-long saga over who would control two century-old movie studios along with a pedigreed stable of TV studios, networks and streaming services including HBO and CNN. Now, attention will turn to the difficult economics faced by the new company, which starts off with some $80 billion in debt and an ambitious plan to convert a traditional media company into a full-on tech firm.
Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, is a key backer of Skydance. His son, David Ellison, an actor-turned-producer who has made a dramatic entrance to the Hollywood corporate scene at just 43 years old, is running the company as chairman and CEO.
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“Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry,” David Ellison said in a statement. “From the start, our ambition was to bring these two storied studios together and create a stronger competitor, with the talent, resources, and reach to tell great stories in every genre, on every platform, for audiences everywhere. Now that ambition is a reality. We’re grateful to everyone who made this possible – the employees, creative talent, and production teams of both companies, who worked tirelessly to get us here and inspire audiences around the world every day, as well as the advisors and partners who guided this transaction to completion. Our focus now turns to the future: building a company that empowers creatives, entertains audiences and rewards shareholders. We couldn’t be more excited to get to work.”
Gerry Cardinale, a Skydance board member and key financier via his firm, RedBird Capital, called the merger close “a defining moment for the industry. By applying our owner-operator model to Paramount and WBD’s unmatched portfolio of iconic franchises, premium original programming, and live sports rights, we can protect that legacy while building for a media landscape that’s undergoing transformational change.”
The merger was set in motion about a year ago when Paramount, soon after combining with the previous incarnation of Skydance, made an unsolicited offer to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. The overture was rebuffed initially, and it took more than a dozen tries for the board of WBD to finally warm up to the deal. Along the way, the board accepted a bid from Netflix to acquire just the streaming and studio side of the company. Ultimately, that proposal fell by the wayside when Paramount made its sweetened pitch to buy all of WBD.
The transaction sailed through regulatory approval, only to hit a major road block in July when the attorneys general of 12 states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the deal on antitrust grounds. The Writers Guild of America filed a similar suit. Thousands of actors, writers, producers and others in the creative community signed a petition opposing the deal.
Initially, it seemed the legal and industry objections could have a chance to derail the combination, or at least result in a shrinking of its scale. In the end, though, the AGs agreed to settle with only so-called “behavioral remedies” being required in a 5-year consent decree. Skydance agreed to negotiate pay-TV deals for Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery as though they were still separate companies as well as supplying a minimum number of theatrical movie releases, among other concessions.
