Now that Shari Redstone has signed on the dotted line to sell her father’s media empire to Skydance and RedBird Capital, what future awaits?
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The vision for a combined Skydance – tech scion David Ellison’s production entity behind franchises like “Mission: Impossible” – and Paramount Global has been reported in dribs and drabs over months of a dramatic deal (which only weeks ago was formally off). An official announcement late on Sunday sheds light on what Paramount’s new owners have in store.
First, and perhaps most importantly, Skydance is dropping $1.5 billion on Paramount’s balance sheet – a cash infusion that hopes to embolden the studio to woo creatives with “stability,” as the formal announcement said, and make brands like Paramount Pictures and CBS more competitive for top talent and packages.
New Paramount, the working title for the merged companies, “will be a premier, creative-first destination for storytellers, dedicated to top-quality content and will be positioned to improve profitability, foster stability and independence for creators, and enable more investment in growth areas,” the announcement said.
Overseeing this effort with be Ellison as chairman and CEO with former NBCUniversal chief Jeff Shell as president. The pair, billed as having “a wealth of operational experience and proven expertise in driving creative,” will formally take over once the transaction closes, expected by the middle of next year. Shell returns to the top of the media sector after he was forced out as CEO of NBCU following sexual harassment accusations and an investigation that found “inappropriate conduct.”
Until then, Paramount’s acting CEOs — George Cheeks, Brian Robbins and Chris McCarthy — are vowing to continue with their campaign of cost-cutting and asset sales.
In the same breath, Ellison signaled his own legacy family business – the tech giant Oracle, run by father Larry Ellison – will come heavily into play as “a focus on technological advancements, across multiple entertainment platforms including animation, gaming, film, sports, news and television” is a priority. It’s unclear to which technologies they refer and how they’ll be applied, but Hollywood is undoubtedly at an inflection point with artificial intelligence and how it will change the future of content.
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This reads like nothing but good news for the fledgling Paramount+, the media company’s streaming service which counts roughly 72 million subscribers after 10 years of operation. Competitors like Netflix and Disney+ have hundreds of millions of eyeballs.
Out of the gate, Skydance has pledged to bring a “modernized infrastructure offering scalability and ingenuity,” one that includes Paramount’s direct-to-consumer platforms, the ad-supported streaming service Pluto and linear networks like MTV.
Gerry Cardinale, who operates the investor RedBird and will stake the new Paramount with the Ellison family, was perhaps most forthcoming about what a legacy media business needs to accomplish in the current landscape.
“As one of the iconic media brands and libraries in Hollywood, Paramount has the intellectual property foundation to ensure longevity through this evolution – but it will require a new generation of visionary leadership together with experienced operational management to navigate this next phase,” Cardinale said.
Skydance-Paramount “will be the pace car for how these incumbent legacy media businesses will need to be run in the future,” he concluded.
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