Paramount Names Its Leadership for the $81 Billion Warner Deal — and the Combined Company Is Simply ‘Skydance’

LOS ANGELES — Paramount Skydance on Monday unveiled the executive team that will run Hollywood’s newest giant once its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closes, confirming that David Ellison will be chairman and chief executive of the combined company — to be known simply as Skydance — alongside Ynon Kreiz, the outgoing Mattel chief executive, as co-CEO.

The announcement, reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, is the first full look at how Ellison intends to govern an entertainment empire that pairs Paramount Pictures with Warner Bros., HBO Max with Paramount+, and CNN with CBS News under a single corporate roof. The deal is expected to close Tuesday, Oct. 6.

A co-CEO split: strategy for Ellison, execution for Kreiz

The structure is a genuine power-sharing arrangement, not a figurehead title. Kreiz will be responsible for day-to-day management and lead the integration of the two businesses, while Ellison focuses on the company’s long-term strategy, creative vision and direction — including talent relationships, strategic partnerships, technology and capital allocation, the company said, according to the Journal.

Kreiz, who joined Paramount on Monday and takes the co-CEO title when the deal closes, will also sit on the board. He steps down from Mattel, which he led through a widely credited turnaround, with Roger Lynch named as his successor there. It is an unusual pairing: a studio owner-operator in Ellison and, in Kreiz, a proven brand-and-franchise builder who previously led Europe’s Endemol and the YouTube channel network Maker Studios before Mattel, per Reuters.

Behind them sits a tight corporate core. Andy Gordon, currently Paramount’s chief strategy officer and chief operating officer, becomes president of the combined company and joins Ellison and Kreiz on the board. Dennis Cinelli stays on as chief financial officer. Makan Delrahim serves as chief legal officer and president of global corporate affairs, Dane Glasgow as chief product officer, Rebecca Mall as chief marketing officer and Melissa Zukerman as chief communications officer, according to dpa-AFX’s account of the announcement. More than a dozen leaders across the combined company’s corporate, business and news functions will report directly to Ellison and Kreiz, the Journal reported.

The lieutenants across film, TV, streaming and news

The creative and operational leadership draws from both sides of the merger. Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein will take on co-chair roles of the Skydance Motion Picture Group, while Peter Safran and James Gunn continue as co-chairs of DC Studios, the Journal reported.

On television and streaming, HBO and HBO Max content chief Casey Bloys will oversee all streaming programming for the combined company, per the Journal, and becomes co-chair and chief content officer of Skydance DTC, covering original programming for HBO Max and Paramount+ as well as strategy and operations across the streaming platforms. George Cheeks serves as co-chair and chief content officer of Skydance TV, whose portfolio includes Warner Bros. Television Studios, CBS Studios, Paramount Television Studios, CBS, the company’s sports operations and more than 50 cable networks and brands. JB Perrette, moving over from Warner Bros. Discovery, is co-chair and chief business officer of both Skydance TV and Skydance DTC, with responsibilities spanning global distribution, advertising sales, content sales and direct-to-consumer strategy.

The news division gets two of the industry’s biggest names in place: Mark Thompson continues as chairman and editor-in-chief of CNN Worldwide, and Bari Weiss continues as editor-in-chief of CBS News, the Journal reported — putting two of America’s most-watched news operations under one roof for the first time.

What’s under one roof

The scale is the story. The $81 billion acquisition — about $111 billion counting Warner Bros. Discovery’s outstanding shares and debt, according to the Associated Press — unites two of Hollywood’s last five legacy studios, the AP reported, along with the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services and dozens of television networks.

Under the Skydance corporate identity, the operating brands keep their names: Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. on the film side; HBO, HBO Max and Paramount+ in streaming; CBS and CNN in news; and DC Studios for superheroes. The franchise shelf is unmatched in modern Hollywood — Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and the DC universe from Warner, Top Gun and Mission: Impossible from Paramount, Yellowstone, the Lord of the Rings and Nickelodeon across the portfolio — plus cable networks including MTV, TBS, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network and Food Network. Readers can follow the closing chapter in our earlier coverage of the merger’s path to closing and the Skydance naming announcement, as well as what the combination means for HBO’s Harry Potter series and CBS’s fall lineup.

Why this pair

The leadership reflects how Ellison got here. His Skydance Media acquired Paramount just last year, the Journal and Reuters reported — a producer-turned-owner arc that made Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, one of the most consequential figures in modern Hollywood dealmaking in under a decade.

Kreiz brings the operating complement. He led Mattel from 2018 through a turnaround that repositioned Barbie, Hot Wheels, Masters of the Universe and UNO as entertainment franchises rather than toy brands alone, with Barbie becoming the company’s defining Hollywood success, The Toy Book reported. Ellison appears to be betting that the franchise playbook Kreiz ran at Mattel scales to a far larger collection of entertainment assets — a company that now owns two of the most valuable film libraries ever assembled.

In a statement carried by the AP, Ellison called the merger a “transformational moment for our industry” and said he and Kreiz will lead a business that is “creator-first, tech-forward and built to scale globally.” Announcing the Skydance name Friday in a post on X, Ellison wrote, per MexicoBusiness.news: “Paramount and Warner Bros. shaped over a century of culture. By combining them, we are not rewriting history — we are equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine.” The name is designed to give the combined company its own corporate identity while letting Paramount and Warner Bros. continue as distinct studio brands, according to coverage in CSI Magazine and ComicBasics.

How it got here — and what comes next

The deal survived a bruising path to the altar. Ellison emerged from what Reuters called a back-and-forth bidding war among several suitors for Warner Bros. Discovery, then faced a legal blockade: in July, a California-led group of 12 state attorneys general — joined by the Writers Guild of America — sued to block the transaction on antitrust grounds, arguing the combination would concentrate the markets for theatrical films and television channels and cost screenwriters jobs, the Journal reported.

The logjam broke last week. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved Paramount’s settlement with the states on Sept. 30, ruling the proposed consent decree was a “fair, reasonable, and good faith approach to address the competitive harms” alleged in the suit, according to the AP. As part of the deal, Paramount agreed to invest at least $1.5 billion more in domestic production over five years and commit funds to a workforce-training program for the entertainment industry, per the Journal. Critics of the merger decried the settlement terms as too weak, the AP noted — a sign the political fight over consolidation will outlive the closing.

With the legal hurdle cleared, the companies expect to complete the deal Tuesday. Per a regulatory filing, the legal name becomes Skydance Corporation on Oct. 6, with the stock trading under the ticker SKYD. Reuters reported that a full executive leadership list is expected soon after closing — meaning Monday’s announcement is the command structure, not the complete roster. What remains unresolved is the hard part: integrating two century-old studios, two streaming services and two news divisions without breaking what made each valuable, under the eyes of regulators, talent agencies and a Hollywood labor movement that fought the deal to the end.

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