Skydance chief says Paramount-Warner merger fixes decade-old miss on Big Tech
The boss of the new Hollywood giant that now owns Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery says the deal is meant to fix a mistake the old media world made ten years ago.
Skydance chief executive David Ellison told CNBC on Thursday that traditional studios "didn't pivot fast enough" when big technology companies started moving into entertainment a decade ago, according to Deadline. The interview took place before executives of the merged company rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange.
The combined company is now called simply Skydance. Its merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery closed on Tuesday.
"This transaction is the solution to those mistakes 10 years ago," Ellison said.
His argument is straightforward. Big Tech firms already owned the platform technology, meaning the apps, devices and delivery systems people use to watch things, and then pushed into making shows and films themselves. Legacy studios were slow to respond.
Ellison said Skydance has now pulled together a library of well-known characters and stories, plus sports and news assets, and is building a product and technology organisation that can compete with anybody coming out of Silicon Valley.
That technology push will sit alongside a very large production slate. Ellison said Skydance is investing more in content than its rivals, at a scale of 30 films a year and more than 180 series.
The scale follows a takeover valued at $110 billion, according to Reuters. Ellison formally took over as chief executive of the merged group when the deal closed on 6 October, OPB reported.
For viewers, this means one company now controls a huge share of familiar franchises, cinemas releases, television channels and streaming libraries. What makes this stand out is how Ellison is framing it. Not as a bigger studio alone, but as a tech rebuild.
Skydance was founded by Ellison in 2010 with a stated mission to make big event-level entertainment for global audiences, according to its newsroom. Sixteen years later, he is betting that future depends as much on software as on stories.
