Skydance Now Owns Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat and Batman — and Didn’t Say a Word About Games

BURBANK — The most famous water tower in Hollywood got a new name on Tuesday. Workers were photographed adding “A Skydance Corporation” beneath the Warner Bros. shield on the Burbank lot within hours of Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery closing — a roughly $110 billion deal that puts everything from HBO and CNN to some of the biggest franchises in gaming under one new owner.

Here’s the part that matters if you own a controller: Warner Bros. Games changed hands in the deal, and the new owner has barely acknowledged it exists. The official closing announcement didn’t mention video games at all, according to GameSpot — a strange omission for a transaction that just absorbed one of the biggest game portfolios in Hollywood.

So what exactly did Skydance just buy? Hogwarts Legacy — one of the best-selling games of the decade — plus NetherRealm’s Mortal Kombat, the Batman: Arkham series, and the LEGO games. That presumably includes the development studios behind them, NetherRealm included, though nobody at the new company has confirmed what the games org chart looks like now. For the full picture on the deal itself, our main merger story has the complete breakdown.

The particulars, for the record: the deal closed Tuesday, October 6, valued at roughly $110 billion including debt. Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders got about $31 a share in cash. The combined company trades on the New York Stock Exchange as SKYD. David Ellison is chairman and CEO, with outgoing Mattel chief Ynon Kreiz as co-CEO. Regulators in nearly 70 jurisdictions signed off — a reminder of just how much legal runway a deal this size needs.

Skydance says the combined company pulls in nearly $70 billion a year in revenue — and it’s targeting more than $6 billion in cost savings within three years. That number is the one to keep an eye on, because savings on that scale don’t come from renegotiating the office coffee contract. Our leadership breakdown has more on who’s running the new company.

Now compare what the new company said about everything else. Film: at least 30 theatrical releases a year. Streaming: more than 200 million subscribers across HBO Max and Paramount+. News: independent editorial oversight boards for CNN and CBS News. Games: nothing. Not a sentence. Nobody has said what happens to those teams next — and that uncertainty is the story of the day.

There is one wrinkle worth watching. Earlier this year, Paramount folded its own games division into a unit called Paramount Game Studio, built to support Paramount IP — including the fighting game Invincible VS. So Skydance now owns two different games operations, and it remains to be seen whether WB Games gets folded into Paramount Game Studio or keeps running as its own thing. That’s not a small question: it decides whether Mortal Kombat and the Arkham games answer to Burbank or to a Paramount-branded games group.

For right now, though: nothing changes for players. Your games still work, the servers are still running, and no project has been cancelled because of the deal. That’s worth saying plainly, because merger news has a way of making people assume the worst on day one. The film-side fallout — including the departure of Warner’s film chiefs — is a separate story.

But day one isn’t the concern — month twelve is. A company carrying an enormous debt load while promising $6 billion in savings will eventually look at every division and ask what it costs. Games are expensive to make, and WB Games arrives with its share of costly swings already on the books. If you’re a fan of any of these franchises, the thing to watch isn’t this week’s press release. It’s next year’s studio headcount.