Paramount Names Skydance Leadership as Merger Set to Close

Carol Massar (0:02)

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You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

Carol Massar (0:15)

One story that constantly keeps creeping back into market news, market stories, also just business stories, media stories, and that is Paramount Skydance. And apparently, it has outlined the executive leadership team that will helm the new company resulting from its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. It's amazing. Just about a year or so ago, all of this started and here we are. This is supposed to happen after the expected closing on Tuesday. Reporting it out for us is Bloomberg News Media reporter. She's Hannah Miller. She joins us here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio.

Are we like there?

Hannah Miller (0:51)

Almost.

Carol Massar (0:51)

Almost.

Hannah Miller (0:52)

We're almost there.

Carol Massar (0:53)

But the closing is going to happen probably.

Hannah Miller (0:56)

Tomorrow is a big day.

Carol Massar (0:57)

All right. Walk us through then because there's been stuff, we've been hearing about leadership and so on and so forth. What did you find out?

Hannah Miller (1:04)

Yeah. We got a big leadership announcement today outlining the teams that will be overseeing Skydance, that is the name of the merged company, when Paramount and Warner Bros. combine.

Carol Massar (1:17)

They're gone. Paramount, Warner Bros.

Tim Stenovec (1:19)

gone.

Hannah Miller (1:19)

It's the studios now. They're still preserving some of that brand identity with the studio names, but yeah, overall, the company is Skydance. That was the name of David Ellison, who is CEO.

That was the name of his media production company when it got started in Hollywood.

Tim Stenovec (1:35)

So, I mean, you talked about the pretty sprawling leadership team. Who are the most important people that we need to know?

Hannah Miller (1:42)

Yeah, I know. So we have some people overseeing streaming. Casey Bloys, he comes over from HBO, Warner Bros. He is playing a pivotal role in overseeing streaming. We know that's a big play for David Ellison and Skydance. Obviously, we'll have the Paramount Plus streaming platform and the HBO Max streaming platform, two major services.

We also know David Ellison has a co-CEO, Ynon Kreiz, who jumped over from Mattel Inc.

Tim Stenovec (2:13)

This blows my mind.

Carol Massar (2:16)

We've talked to him a lot on air here when he was running Mattel. Explain that to me.

Hannah Miller (2:22)

Yeah. We know he has exposure to the film and entertainment space because of the Barbie movie. He spearheaded that for Mattel, worked with Warner Bros. on that film, which was a huge box office success for them.

He recognizes the strengths of these brands, the strength of IP, and we know David Ellison wants to create more content. This is a huge goal for him, and we think that Kreiz will be a good asset on that.

Carol Massar (2:48)

Because he wanted to do so much more with the IP of Mattel. There were just so many cool brands. If you think about it, it's very Disney-esque. If you think about the different brands there and what you could maybe turn it into. Barbie, I think we're all assuming another movie is happening, coming. I don't know.

We'll see. We had heard too that there's a global town hall at Paramount Skydance. What does it mean for the employees who are there? We just came off of screen time. Casey Boyes of HBO spoke, you know that.

But there were comments made about there's fewer and fewer studios. We just had Sarah Jessica Parker in here. She too said, we talked about Hollywood, she goes, it's good for some people, but not good for everybody.

Hannah Miller (3:32)

Yeah.

It'll be really interesting to see what happens. We know a lot of the employees are on edge. They're worried. They know major changes are going to happen. We know David Ellison is eyeing $6 billion worth of cost efficiencies post-merger. That's a lot. People are worried about their jobs. We've seen as news trickles out about who's going to be in charge, we've seen some reassurance for employees. Mark Thompson, he's the CEO of CNN. It got confirmed today that he will be staying on and overseeing the news network.

Carol Massar (4:03)

That's a big deal. I think there was a lot of concerns with what's happened with CBS. It's certainly changed in terms of a news organization, whether or not that would happen at CNN.

Hannah Miller (4:12)

Yes. He sent out a memo to employees today and was like, listen, I know we've all had our trepidations, but I'm coming into this with a positive frame of mind. He believes in what they're doing and he also emphasized that he thinks CNN will be able to maintain editorial independence.