Skydance Is Born as Paramount Closes the $111B Warner Bros. Takeover, Francis Halzen Wins the Nobel Prize in Physics: Tuesday’s Top News

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2026 — Hollywood has a new superpower: Paramount closed its $111 billion Warner Bros. takeover Tuesday and the combined giant is now called Skydance. A Wisconsin physicist won the Nobel Prize for turning a mile of Antarctic ice into a telescope, Saudi-backed forces retook the Bab el-Mandeb coast, Trump did a U-turn on mail-in voting, and Hollywood said goodbye to Eva Marie Saint at 102. Here are the ten stories that mattered.

1. Skydance is born: Paramount closes the $111B Warner Bros. takeover

It’s official: Paramount closed its roughly $110–111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday, the largest corporate takeover in Hollywood history. The combined company now operates as Skydance and trades on the NYSE under SKYD, with nearly $70 billion in annual revenue and more than 200 million streaming subscribers across HBO Max and Paramount+. David Ellison is chairman and CEO with former Mattel chief Ynon Kreiz as co-CEO, while outgoing WBD boss David Zaslav steps down. A court-approved settlement with 12 state attorneys general cleared the final hurdle — with conditions including no studio-lot sales for five years, $300 million a year toward U.S. film production, at least 30 theatrical films across the first two years, and an editorial-independence board for CNN and CBS News. What the merger means for viewers

2. Francis Halzen wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for hunting ghost particles under Antarctic ice

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics to Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin–Madison — the prize’s sole recipient this year. The Academy said the prize honors his “decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin,” the culmination of an idea Halzen first proposed in 1988: turning a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, laced with more than 5,000 light sensors, into the world’s largest neutrino telescope. IceCube’s first detection of neutrinos from beyond the solar system came in 2013, opening the field of neutrino astronomy. The prize carries 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million. How a mile of ice became a telescope

3. Saudi-backed forces retake the Bab el-Mandeb coast as Yemen’s war escalates

Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces launched “Operation Dawn of Yemen” on Monday — the Saudi air force says around 100 fighter jets struck hundreds of targets — and retook the coast around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait up to the port city of Mocha from Iran-backed Houthi fighters. The strait carries roughly 12 percent of global trade and has grown more vital since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis claimed retaliatory missile and drone strikes on Riyadh’s airport and an Aramco refinery — claims that remain unverified — while Reuters verified graphic footage from government forces showing armored vehicles driving over Houthi fighters, some apparently unarmed, prompting Houthi accusations of war crimes. Earlier: the Taiz offensive

4. Trump reverses course on mail-in voting as Republicans trail in the midterms

President Trump, who spent years calling mail ballots “inherently corrupt” and promised in August 2025 to lead a movement to eliminate them, is now urging supporters to vote by mail: “Vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person on Election Day,” he told a Monday night rally in Grand Island, Nebraska. The reversal comes with Republicans trailing on the generic congressional ballot — Democrats led 53 to 42 percent in an Emerson College poll taken Sept. 21–22 — and polling averages putting Trump’s approval near 38 percent against roughly 60 percent disapproval. The White House has been pushing voter registration through official channels, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed that service members get a day off to vote.

5. Box office: Verity takes the weekend, Digger face-plants, and Endgame reclaims the all-time crown

Amazon MGM’s Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity won the weekend with $32.6 million domestic and $62.6 million worldwide — the strongest theatrical debut yet for a Hoover book, and Anne Hathaway’s third No. 1 opening of 2026 — though a C+ CinemaScore hints at front-loading. Tom Cruise’s Digger collapsed to $8 million domestic and $20 million worldwide, his worst opening since Lions for Lambs in 2007, on a budget reported between $125 and $180 million plus roughly $100 million in marketing — a grim final release for Warner Bros. before the Skydance merger closed, with film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy exiting. And in a twist worthy of its title, the Avengers: Endgame Encore reissue pushed the film’s lifetime total to $2.9255 billion, edging past Avatar’s $2.9237 billion to retake the all-time worldwide crown — weeks before Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18. The full weekend numbers

6. Eva Marie Saint, Oscar winner for On the Waterfront, dies at 102

Eva Marie Saint died Tuesday of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, her publicist Jeff Sanderson confirmed. She was 102 — the oldest living Academy Award winner. Saint won the Oscar for best supporting actress for her film debut as Edie Doyle in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront opposite Marlon Brando, then pivoted to cool double agent Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest — a seven-decade career that also brought an Emmy for the miniseries People Like Us. Remembering a Hollywood original

7. AI chip startup Etched is fielding funding offers at a $40–50B valuation

Etched, the four-year-old AI inference-chip startup, is fielding investment offers valuing it at $40 to $50 billion — roughly quadruple in three months, after a $700 million round led by Jane Street set a $21 billion mark in September (itself up from $10.3 billion in July). The company claims its chips process more tokens faster and cheaper than Nvidia’s, says it has $1 billion in customer orders — Jane Street is both lead investor and an early customer — and builds at TSMC. About 15 percent of its roughly 400 employees are Nvidia alumni.

8. OpenAI starts watermarking ChatGPT text in the EU — and testing ads in image results

OpenAI unveiled “textGrain” on Monday, an invisible statistical watermark embedded in word choices for ChatGPT and Codex text output, rolling out in the EU within weeks to comply with the EU AI Act; API developers worldwide can opt in. Detection runs about 95 percent at 400 tokens but falls to roughly 66 percent if a tenth of the words are swapped for synonyms, and detector access is limited to approved researchers for now. Separately, the company has begun testing visual ads inside image-generation results in the U.S. How textGrain works

9. Gears of War: E-Day launches — Xbox’s big fall swing

The Coalition’s Gears of War: E-Day launched worldwide Tuesday at 8 a.m. PT, day one on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, on Xbox Series X|S and PC. The prequel goes back 14 years before the original Gears of War, following a young Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago through the first hours of Emergence Day — the earliest point in the series’ chronology — and it’s the Xbox console exclusive the platform needed this fall. Why Xbox needed this win

10. Apple’s October 13 event: the smart home hub and the Siri referendum

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports Apple will hold an event Tuesday, October 13, to unveil its long-delayed smart home hub — a roughly 6-inch square display in tabletop and wall-mounted versions with a FaceTime camera — plus a new HomePod mini and a new Apple TV 4K. All three are built around Siri AI, and the devices were delayed for years waiting on the Siri overhaul, making this the referendum on Apple’s AI comeback after the September 9 iPhone launch. What to expect