(Oct 7): It’s telling that among the first casualties of David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros Discovery Inc were Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, the studio executives known for spending freely on auteur-driven films like last year’s best-picture winner, One Battle After Another.
The film-making career of Ellison, the son of Oracle Corp co-founder Larry Ellison, has largely focused on what the industry calls “popcorn” pictures: mass-market crowd pleasers like Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning and Top Gun: Maverick, two films he helped produce that together grossed more than US$2 billion (RM8.17 billion) in theatres and were also hits with critics.
After Ellison took control of Paramount last year, he installed new management to broaden the film slate and introduce more fiscal discipline. The result was hits from well-known franchises like Scream 7 and Scary Movie that have put the Paramount film division on track for one of its most profitable years in the past decade and a half.
On Tuesday evening, at the century-old Paramount Pictures lot in Los Angeles, where films such as Sunset Boulevard and The Godfather were shot, Ellison described his vision as co-chief executive officer of the newly created Skydance Corp, following his US$110 billion acquistion of rival Warner Bros.
“This combined company will be spending more on content and on storytelling than any other company in the world, more than Disney, more than Netflix,” Ellison said, addressing employees and journalists gathered in a soundstage. “That’s going to be really good for jobs.”
In marrying two of Hollywood’s big five studios, Ellison gains a stable of franchises that include Batman, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Superman. The closest comparison in scale is Walt Disney Co’s US$71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, which gave Disney access to franchises including Avatar, X-Men and Planet of the Apes that power movie-going, demand for theme-park tickets and merchandise sales. But that deal resulted in fewer films coming from the combined studios, as Disney prioritised major releases.
Ellison said he wants to have a diverse slate of films, noting that his favourite movie last year was Warner Bros’ Sinners, a genre-bending vampire thriller. He and Skydance co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, who left Mattel Inc to join the company, said they plan to divide their time between the two studio lots.
“The plan is to keep the studios independent creatively, so that each studio will have its own slate, its own relationships, its own opportunities,” Kreiz said.
In overseeing responsibility for the creative aspects of the business and relationships with talent, Ellison is expected to focus on valuable and beloved franchises from the two iconic Hollywood studios, favouring movies with stronger commercial prospects than the artier fare that’s defined Warner Bros in recent years.
Ellison has assembled an executive team to turn his ambition into reality. He’s expanded the roles of Paramount Pictures heads Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, who as co-chairs of Skydance Motion Picture Group will oversee a slate of at least 30 releases a year in cinemas. The pair plan to build a calendar with titles that are varied enough to appeal to the widest possible number of moviegoers.
Their expanded remit and role at the new Skydance also highlights the fickle fates of the movie business. After being close to losing their jobs in early 2025, Abdy and De Luca were hailed for a string of hits later that year including Minecraft, Sinners and Weapons, leading Warner Bros to its best box office performance in years. Their contracts were renewed.
But this year brought a string of fresh disappointments, including The Bride! and Digger, which stars Tom Cruise as a theatre actor playing an oil tycoon contending with an environmental catastrophe. Despite Cruise’s star power, the film opened in fifth place to just US$8 million in its debut last weekend. Combined with other box office failures, including The End of Oak Street and Practical Magic 2, Warner Bros studios is poised to lose hundreds of millions of dollars this year.
With nearly US$87 billion in total debt and a commitment to find US$6 billion in cost savings within three years, Ellison has little room for error at the box office.
Goldberg and Greenstein are making new movies in the proven intellectual property worlds of A Quiet Place, Paranormal Activity, Transformers, Sonic the Hedgehog, GI Joe and Star Trek.
They are also exploring original ideas. Last fall they appointed Lia Buman as the head of Paramount subsidiary Republic Pictures, which acquired the literary adaptation The Midnight Library at the Cannes Film Festival, and signed production deals with Wicked director Jon M Chu, Predator film-maker Dan Trachtenberg, and Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer.
In May, Paramount agreed to a pact with Warner Music Group Corp that gives the studio rights to make movies based on the lives of the music company’s roster of artists such as Madonna, Frank Sinatra, Cher, Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie.
“They’re going to make 30 movies a year, growing to 32, and I don’t think they’re all going to be big blockbusters — I assume they’re going to pick the best projects from each studio, and they’re probably going to weed out and kill a few projects,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at LightShed Partners. “The new management team probably gets its first big crack at changes at 2028, and there’s a lot of IPs between these two companies to mine.”
Skydance is inheriting close to 40 movies in varying levels of development and production that were greenlit by De Luca and Abdy. The fate of those titles — which Warner Bros printed on funereal-black T-shirts the studio distributed to cinema executives at an industry conference earlier this year after a sale to Paramount had been agreed — is up in the air.
The makeup of Skydance’s movie slate could change if Goldberg and Greenstein determine that the Warner Bros films aren’t sufficiently commercial. Ellison often cites 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick as an example of his tastes and ambition for the film studio.
Eric Schiffer, the CEO of the Patriarch Organization, a private-equity firm based in Los Angeles that invests in media, said Ellison will likely look within the new Skydance’s vast library of content for ideas and take cues from competitors.
“I think they will re-examine a lot of their legacy IPs to see what can be brought back and modernised,” he said. “It would not surprise me to see them also experiment with more creators. You’re seeing that done by Netflix where they’re pulling some of the YouTube stars.”
In another indication of where Ellison sees safe bets, he has retained Peter Safran and James Gunn, the co-heads of the DC Studios comic-book hero label, whose hits include Superman and Aquaman. Ellison, who views DC as a pillar in his movie strategy, has backed their vision and the two are currently spearheading a 10-year plan to revive the superhero label, Bloomberg has reported. The pair are supervising DC’s release of Clayface on Oct 23 after their last film, Supergirl, failed to turn a profit in cinemas.
Earlier this year, Ellison travelled to Atlanta to the set of DC’s Superman sequel, where studio heads gave a presentation to Paramount management including chief financial officer Dennis Cinelli and Andy Gordon, who is now Skydance’s president, outlining the comic book studio’s strategy.
There are other potential hits in the works.
As part of a distribution deal with Dune and Minecraft producer Legendary Entertainment that Goldberg and Greenstein signed last year, Paramount will also release Street Fighter, based on the video game of the same name, on Oct 16. Ellison has made a priority of adapting youth-oriented video game properties, and Skydance is scheduled to release a live-action Call of Duty movie in June 2028.
Cruise is also on deck to star in a third film in the Top Gun franchise, and to helm a sequel to the car racing film Days of Thunder. In a presentation tied to the closing of the deal on Tuesday, Ellison noted that Paramount’s theatrical releases had nearly doubled under his leadership to 15 films this year from eight in 2025.
Skydance’s film committment sets a high bar, and will be enforced by Californian attorney general Rob Bonta, who wrung out concessions as part of a settlement to an antitrust lawsuit brought by 12 states. Ellison has promised to release 30 films a year from the combined companies, keeping them in cinemas for at least 45 days.
“When we actually follow through on all those promises, I do believe it will rebuild trust,” Ellison said, while speaking at the lot.
Donna Langley, the chair of Comcast Corp’s NBCUniversal Entertainment division, said it’s important film output doesn’t suffer as part of the merger, as it did after Disney acquired Fox.
“More young people are coming to the cinema, and we need to keep them there, so volume matters,” Langley, who runs the unit that includes the Universal Pictures film studio and Peacock streaming service, said at the annual Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on Oct 1.
That view reflects a wider anxiety in Hollywood about shrinking opportunities. Ellison has repeatedly insisted that the merger, which will create the largest theatrical distributor in the US by most estimates, will support the creative community by increasing the combined output of the Paramount and Warner Bros studios. He also told employees in a town hall on Tuesday that the appointment of Kreiz, who helped shepherd the hit Barbie move while he was the CEO of Mattel, was based on his ability to take “extraordinary brands and IPs” and build businesses around them for a global audience.
“We are positioned to win in a way none of us have been before,” Ellison said in the town hall. “For the first time, we have the studios, the franchises, the libraries, the talent and the scale, all under one roof, to compete with anyone in the world.”
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