Yellowstone, Top Gun, Chalamet: what will the Paramount-Skydance merger mean for film and TV?

The Guardian

a day ago

The merger between Paramount and Skydance has finally been completed, with various roadblocks (including Stephen Colbert, apparently, as well as the related 60 Minutes settlement/bribery) cleared from the path of a new entity called Paramount, A Skydance Corporation.
It's an appropriately franchise-y moniker for a merger between a major Hollywood studio and a company that made its bones as a constant financer of some of its biggest movie series. This ends (for now) years of speculation over what might be done with Paramount, a global conglomerate that was nonetheless considered on less sure footing than its fellow remaining big five studios, Disney, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. (Well, maybe not the recently embattled Warner Bros, though they seem to have gotten a major reprieve with their killer 2025 slate) Skydance honcho David Ellison is the new Paramount CEO. The new co-chairs of Paramount Pictures will be Skydance executive Dana Goldberg and former Sony executive Josh Greenstein.
But with Ellison at the top boasting years of Skydance experience, he'll ultimately be determining Paramount's fortunes as a movie and TV company. The son of billionaire Larry Ellison, David for years seemed like he got into the movies primarily to work in closer proximity to airplanes. His first film as a producer was the 2005 flop Flyboys, a world war one fighter-pilot drama that was an early strike against the burgeoning movie career of star James Franco. Undeterred, the next year he founded Skydance Media, the kind of thing a 23-year-old budding pilot can do if they happen also to be a billionaire's son.
Over the years, the company co-financed a number of big Paramount productions. They didn't all or even mostly involve fighter planes, but they did include big Paramount brands (Mission: Impossible, Star Trek), would-be franchise-starters and restarters (Jack Reacher, Jack Ryan, a couple of Terminators) and, in what Ellison must have considered his crowning achievement, Top Gun: Maverick, for which he received a best picture nomination as one of the film's producers. So does this indicate that Paramount will move towards making Top Gun even more of a signature title, the platonic ideal of billion-dollar nostalgia franchise with ample access to expensive fighter planes?
Maybe. In some ways, the Skydance merger isn't as grim as other corporate acquisitions in this field. Ellison is just 42, which sets him apart from someone like Bob Iger (who recently unretired in his 70s and still hasn't set a proper successor). The deal also doesn't consolidate Paramount under another studio's umbrella, the way that 20th Century Fox went from storied, century-old cinema legacy to Disney shingle that mostly revives franchises from its catalog and produces lower-budget offerings directly for streaming. (This was a possibility for Paramount; Sony was apparently looking at acquiring them.) Nor does the merger put another movie studio under the control of a tech company. Though it's not exactly known for an art-forward sensibility – like, say, Annapurna, the more prestigious movie company that David's sister, Megan, founded in 2011 – Skydance is still mainly an entertainment firm.
What, then, might be expected from Paramount in the Skydance era? The relative narrowness of previous Skydance operations suggests an ongoing ignorance about how to run other aspects of the business, such as the news division of CBS. Ellison has talked a bit about keeping CBS trustworthy and independent, but a leading 60 Minutes producer already quit, pre-merger, over pre-merger interference from Paramount. Ellison also made comments about most people identifying as 'center-right' or 'center-left', a thinking that suggests he's looking at journalism in terms of pleasing his audience, rather than doing reporting that might prompt baseless charges of bias. Less of an ethical challenge but central to the Paramount business is the ongoing dip in value of the company's signature cable brands – they own MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and Showtime, among others – which other companies have dealt with by spinning off into separate entities. But these channels are arguably more tied into Paramount's identity; Nickelodeon, for example, has provided a steady stream of movie hits in addition to TV franchises. They will probably stay put for now (though that won't protect them from layoffs). Between those brands and the company's seeming political triangulating, it seems likely that the importance of Taylor Sheridan, whose universe of centrist-appeal western shows does so well in traditional TV terms, will only increase.
Despite that cable legacy, streaming and 'non-linear' TV are said to be a priority for the company, with Ellison mentioning a dedication to premium streaming-only movies and shows in his day-one open letter. Though Skydance had some success working on big-picture theatrical franchises for Paramount, their branched-out efforts to provide content for various streaming services has been more typical of that arena – that is, often expensive but somehow still low-rent. Ghosted, Heart of Stone, 6 Underground … several of the interchangeable streaming caper/spy movies that feel more like mockbusters than events have Skydance's name on them. They often feel, in fact, like knockoffs of the movies Paramount might have made for theaters in the 2000s and 2010s. Skydance also attempted to start their own animation studio by employing the disgraced former Pixar head John Lasseter, which so far has resulted in the twin embarrassments of Luck (on Apple TV+) and Spellbound (on Netflix). The company does have an animated project from the Incredibles creator Brad Bird in the works, as well as a cartoon called, uh, Pookoo. They're also shooting a live-action project called Matchbox. This is not a code name. It is based on the toy cars.
Those movies won't be on the Paramount slate, but they could be indicative of where the corporate heads are at when it comes time to rebuild the movie studio. Ellison may not be a tech CEO, but his billionaire dad is; Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle. That mix of established money and a vaguely tech-forward outlook could turn out to be recent-big-business as usual. The real question mark regarding Skydance is how (or if) they might handle the stuff that doesn't involve blatant imitating or trend-chasing that every big studio does. (Has any movie studio undergoing a shift in the past decade declared an intention not to leverage a bunch of supposedly valuable old IP?) Recent past periods of creativity flourishing at Paramount seemed almost accidental. In the mid-to-late 2010s, for example, the studio had a few years where they made or distributed Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!!, Alexander Payne's Downsizing, Darren Aronofsky's Mother!, Martin Scorsese's Silence, and Denzel Washington's Fences, among others, boldly supporting movies made by and for thinking adults. (They also made some pretty decent franchise movies with Skydance, such as Star Trek Beyond and several Mission: Impossible entries.)
It doesn't seem like Skydance's first priority it would be replicating any of those grownup movies, even a hit like Arrival. Yet it is hopeful that the first announced Paramount Pictures deal brokered by Goldberg and Greenstein is a James Mangold-directed, Timothée Chalamet-starring original film called High Side – in other words, an old-fashioned, A-list-director-and-star combination. Maybe Ellison and his lieutenants are able to reach back to more Paramount-specific projects – their thrillers of the 70s, the star-driven comedies of the 80s and 90s, the surprise inventiveness of their affiliation with MTV films – and do a little more than play with Matchbox cars and fighter jets.