Skydance Officially Closes Its $110 Billion Warner Bros. Discovery Deal, and HBO Max Is Set to Absorb Paramount+

Skydance’s long and litigious bid for Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a bid. The $110 billion acquisition officially closed on October 6, about a month after Paramount settled the antitrust fight that had frozen the deal, and roughly a year after a combined HBO Max and Paramount+ streamer was still just speculation. With the deal done, the newly renamed Skydance Corporation has already named who runs its streaming business and confirmed that HBO Max and Paramount+ are heading toward becoming one service.

The Deal, By the Numbers

Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders received $31.01666668 per share in cash, with the acquisition financed through $30 billion in first-lien secured notes, $11.4 billion plus 885 million euros in second-lien secured notes, $8.5 billion plus 850 million euros in term B-1 loans, and roughly $47 billion in new Class B equity priced at $12 a share. The Ellison family and RedBird now hold 100 percent of voting power as the company’s sole Class A shareholders, and the combined business, spanning two film studios, two streaming services, CBS and HBO’s television assets, CBS News and CNN, plus live sports and franchise libraries, now operates under the Skydance Corporation name. Announcing the deal’s close, CEO David Ellison called it “a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry.”

Casey Bloys, HBO’s chief for nearly 25 years, now oversees streaming content for both HBO Max and Paramount+.

Who’s Running the Combined Streaming Business

Bloys has been named co-chair and chief content officer of Skydance DTC, overseeing original programming, strategy, operations, and performance across both HBO Max and Paramount+. JB Perrette, who previously ran Warner Bros. Discovery’s global streaming and games business, becomes co-chair and chief business officer of both Skydance DTC and Skydance TV, taking direct oversight of distribution, advertising sales, content sales, DTC strategy, marketing, and business operations across the two platforms. Cindy Holland, who had chaired Paramount+’s direct-to-consumer business, is departing as a result. In her exit memo, she wrote that “David is optimizing for HBO stability as we move into this next chapter.”

JB Perrette moves from Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming and games chief to running the business side of Skydance’s combined direct-to-consumer and TV divisions.

One Streaming Service, Eventually

Skydance has confirmed that HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery+ will eventually merge into a single, still-unnamed streaming service, though the company is being deliberately vague about when. No pricing, launch date, or brand name has been disclosed, only a promise of “greater innovation” and unspecified improvements once the platforms come together. Industry analysts expect the technical integration to echo the backend consolidation Paramount already carried out when it combined Paramount+, Pluto, and BET+ onto one platform, just at a much larger scale this time. The rest of the new org chart reads like a map of the whole industry consolidating at once: James Gunn and Peter Safran stay on as co-chairs of DC Studios, Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein co-chair the Motion Picture Group, Mark Thompson chairs CNN Worldwide, and Bari Weiss remains editor in chief of CBS News.

The gaming side of the company moved first. The same day the Warner Bros. Discovery deal closed, Skydance merged Warner Bros. Games and Paramount’s games studio into a single division under Tony Driscoll, a preview of the same consolidation now heading for HBO Max and Paramount+.

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Picture Source: Warner Bros. Discovery, Warner Bros. Discovery