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T<\/span>he 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But with Ellison at the top boasting years of Skydance experience, he\u2019ll ultimately be determining Paramount\u2019s 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\u2019s son.<\/p>\n Over the years, the company co-financed a number of big Paramount productions. They didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n <\/span>A young David Ellison promoting Flyboys in 2006.<\/span> Photograph: Max Morse\/Reuters<\/p>\n Maybe. In some ways, the Skydance merger isn\u2019t 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\u2019t set a proper successor). The deal also doesn\u2019t consolidate Paramount under another studio\u2019s 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\u2019s not exactly known for an art-forward sensibility \u2013 like, say, Annapurna, the more prestigious movie company that David\u2019s sister, Megan, founded in 2011 \u2013 Skydance is still mainly an entertainment firm.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ccenter-right\u201d or \u201ccenter-left\u201d, a thinking that suggests he\u2019s 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\u2019s signature cable brands \u2013 they own MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and Showtime, among others \u2013 which other companies have dealt with by spinning off into separate entities. But these channels are arguably more tied into Paramount\u2019s 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\u2019t protect them from layoffs). Between those brands and the company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Despite that cable legacy, streaming and \u201cnon-linear\u201d 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 \u2013 that is, often expensive but somehow still low-rent. Ghosted, Heart of Stone, 6 Underground \u2026 several of the interchangeable streaming caper\/spy movies that feel more like mockbusters than events have Skydance\u2019s 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\u2019re also shooting a live-action project called Matchbox. This is not a code name. It is based on the toy cars.<\/p>\n <\/span>Director James Mangold and Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet on the set of A Complete Unknown.<\/span> Photograph: Macall Polay\/Searchlight Pictures<\/p>\n Those movies won\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s Arrival, Richard Linklater\u2019s Everybody Wants Some!!, Alexander Payne\u2019s Downsizing, Darren Aronofsky\u2019s Mother!, Martin Scorsese\u2019s Silence, and Denzel Washington\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t seem like Skydance\u2019s 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, Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet-starring original film called High Side \u2013 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 \u2013 their thrillers of the 70s, the star-driven comedies of the 80s and 90s, the surprise inventiveness of their affiliation with MTV films \u2013 and do a little more than play with Matchbox cars and fighter jets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s an appropriately franchise-y moniker for a merger between a major Hollywood studio and a company that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[8544,1171,997,1910,4849,5752,3168,1168,4553],"class_list":{"0":"post-14946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-chalamet","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-gun","11":"tag-merger","12":"tag-paramount","13":"tag-paramountskydance","14":"tag-pictures","15":"tag-top","16":"tag-yellowstone"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}