What future awaits now that Shari Redstone has signed on the dotted line to sell her father’s media empire to Skydance and RedBird Capital?
The vision for a combined Skydance — tech scion David Ellison’s production entity behind franchises like “Mission: Impossible” — and Paramount Global has been thinly reported throughout months of a dramatic deal (which formally expired just weeks ago). An official announcement late Sunday sheds light on what Paramount’s new owners have in store.
First, and perhaps most importantly, Skydance is dropping $1.5 billion onto Paramount’s balance sheet — a cash infusion that the studio hopes will encourage creatives to pursue “stability,” as the formal announcement put it, and 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 destination for storytellers, committed to top-quality content and will be positioned to improve profitability, promote stability and independence for creators, and increase investment in growth areas,” the announcement said.
Overseeing these efforts will be Be Ellison as chairman and CEO and former NBCUniversal chief Jeff Shell as president. The pair, who are said to have ‘a wealth of operational experience and proven expertise in driving creativity’, will formally take over once the transaction is completed, expected by the middle of next year. Shell returns to the top of the media industry after being forced to resign as CEO of NBCU following allegations of sexual harassment and an investigation that found “inappropriate conduct.”
Until then, Paramount’s acting CEOs George Cheeks, Brian Robbins and Chris McCarthy vow to continue their campaign of cost cuts and asset sales.
In the same breath, Ellison indicated that his own family business – the technology giant Oracle, run by father Larry Ellison – will play a major role as “a focus on technological advancements, across multiple entertainment platforms, including animation, gaming, film, sports, news and television” is a priority. It’s unclear what technologies they’ll cover and how they’ll be applied, but Hollywood is undoubtedly at an inflection point when it comes to artificial intelligence and how it will change the future of content.
This seems like nothing but good news for the young Paramount+, the media company’s streaming service that has approximately 72 million subscribers after ten years of use. Competitors like Netflix and Disney+ have hundreds of millions of eyeballs.
Skydance has promised to deliver a “modernized infrastructure that delivers scalability and ingenuity,” one that includes Paramount’s direct-to-consumer platforms, ad-supported streaming service Pluto and linear networks like MTV.
Gerry Cardinale, who operates investor RedBird and will bring the new Paramount into the Ellison family, was perhaps the most candid about what a legacy media company needs to accomplish in today’s landscape.
“As one of Hollywood’s iconic media brands and libraries, Paramount has the intellectual property foundation to ensure longevity through this evolution – but it will take a new generation of visionary leadership along with experienced operations management to navigate this next phase to navigate,” said Cardinale. .
Skydance-Paramount “will set the pace for how these established media companies will need to be run in the future,” he concluded.