As Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery neared completion in recent months, the entertainment trade press tried out a few new names for the combined company. WarnerMount? ParaBros?
Now, just days before the combined company debuts on Oct. 6, the new name has been revealed: Skydance.
David Ellison, the tech scion in charge of the combined company, announced the name on Friday in his first post on the social network X that included a video mash-up of iconic films from both studios.
The name is a homage to Mr. Ellison’s love of aviation, a passion he shares with his father, Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder who is backing the $111 billion deal for Warner Bros. It also shares the name of Mr. Ellison’s original entertainment company, formed in 2006, which has produced big-budget blockbusters like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.”
In his post, Mr. Ellison said that he would preserve the names of the companies’ iconic studios — Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures.
“We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one,” he wrote. “Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. — and all our extraordinary brands — to remain in the spotlight.”
In recent decades, mergers of media companies typically resulted in a portmanteau of the combined companies’ names: AOL Time Warner, for the disastrous fusion of old-line media and dial-up internet; Warner Bros. Discovery, the entity that united reality TV with prestige TV; ViacomCBS, the original name for the two halves of Sumner Redstone’s media empire.
When Mr. Ellison acquired Paramount, he continued the trend, christening the new entity Paramount: a Skydance Corporation.
In choosing a simpler name, Mr. Ellison is going in a different direction.
The name is one of the biggest details Mr. Ellison had to decide on before the deal closes. Already, he has made room for Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO, by working out an exit deal with Paramount’s streaming chief, Cindy Holland and found a co-chief executive in Ynon Kreiz, formerly the top executive of the toymaker Mattel. He is also negotiating to keep Mark Thompson, the chief executive of CNN, in place for the foreseeable future.
Still, there are many challenges ahead. The new company will debut with $80 billion in debt. Mr. Ellison has pledged to cut $6 billion in costs, which will result in painful layoffs. And he agreed to a series of concessions when settling an antitrust lawsuit brought by a group of state attorneys general. Among them: distributing 30 movies to theaters a year and spending an additional $1.5 billion on films over the next five years.
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