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How the Skydance Merger Will Remake Hollywood and the News Business

The Ellison family’s $110 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery means more top-down control, and less room for dissent.

An image protesting the Skydance-Warner Bros. merger projected on Jazz at Lincoln Center during the News and Documentary Emmy Awards last May.

No, Frodo did not throw the ring into Mt. Doom in time. Ethan Hunt did not get to the top of the Eiffel Tower to defuse the bomb. A lone X-Wing Fighter did not blow up the Death Star.

This is all to say that, despite the best efforts of the Writers Guild of America, 12 states attorneys general, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, and the thousands of people who now get to lie awake at night wondering if they’ll have a job in two months—despite a months-long initiative to stop the Skydance merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery—that deal closed this Tuesday. The Empire struck back, and the Empire won.

To recap, the Trump-aligned Ellison family now owns Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., HBO, CBS, Paramount , CBS News, 60 Minutes, and CNN. To make this deal happen, the Ellisons took on a staggering debt load of $80 billion. How will they repay it? First, they’ll ask a lot of other people to pay it for them—by laying them off. They will begin consolidating duplicated services—they don’t need two marketing departments, or two of anything on the infrastructure side. Disney laid off nearly 4,000 people in 2019 alone to help pay for its buyout of 21st Century Fox to compete with Netflix. With the announcement of a far larger merger, backed by stupendously bigger loans, a staggering wave of job losses is about to hit Los Angeles.

The machinations of billionaires in the entertainment industry, and their round-robin cycles of mergers and acquisitions, mean very little to the audience for Hollywood productions, but here’s one thing that will: It was announced soon after the deal closed that Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy have been fired. They are the executive team that brought three Warner Bros. movies to the Oscars last year: Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Weapons. They did that rarest of things in today’s Hollywood: Their studio produced movies popular at awards season and with the public. It’s been a joke for years that few people ever see the top movies up for the Oscars—that the stars walking up the red carpet are seen by more people than saw the movies featuring them. That changed last year.

As Deluca and Abdy exited the building, Paramount also announced that the Transformers franchise will be revived via an eighth installment, with Michael Bay returning to direct and Steven Spielberg overseeing as producer. An $80 billion debt load means you have much less latitude to take risks on new ideas. Not that Hollywood’s new Skydance overlords will need them: the newly merged leviathan is home to DC Studios, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe (and all the anti-trans toxicity she brings to everything she touches), Looney Tunes, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Lord of the Rings, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and Top Gun. It’s easy to see the future of movies. As Tom Cruise and Alejandro Innaritu’s bold, uninhibited, and critically panned Digger (2026) struggles at the box office for Warner Bros.,........

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