Paramount and Warner Bros. Close Their Merger as Skydance, Putting DC, CNN, CBS, and HBO in One Company

The merger is closed. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery became one company on Tuesday, October 6, under the name Skydance. David Ellison, chairman and chief executive, called it a historic day for the company and the industry. Shares of the combined business moved to the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SKYD. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery stopped trading on Nasdaq. The price tag in Tuesday’s accounts runs from about $110 billion to $111 billion. Annual revenue is put at $70 billion. Net debt is about $80 billion. A $6 billion savings target sits on the integration plan, with Paramount saying a large share is meant to come from non-labor sources — shared streaming tech and cloud contracts — rather than from cuts alone. The brands the user can now list on one org chart are the point of the deal. DC Studios. Nickelodeon. Cartoon Network, from the Warner Bros. Discovery side. CNN. CBS. HBO. Paramount+. HBO Max. Also in the pile: MTV, Comedy Central, TBS, TNT, Pluto TV, Discovery+, CBS News, CBS Sports. Franchises cited in the close notices include Harry Potter, the DC Universe, Game of Thrones, Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Yellowstone, and SpongeBob SquarePants. Two of the last major studio lots. Two news networks. Two flagship streamers. One owner. How It Got to Tuesday Ellison’s Skydance bought Paramount Global in 2025. The bid for Warner Bros. Discovery followed within the year. Warner’s board first waved it off. Netflix had a path to the studio and streaming assets. It took more than a dozen approaches, in Deadline’s telling, before the board called Paramount’s $31-a-share offer for the whole company superior. Regulators in 68 jurisdictions, including the Justice Department, the FCC, the European Commission, and Britain’s competition authority, cleared it. The last lock was a lawsuit by 12 state attorneys general and a parallel Writers Guild case. Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the states’ settlement on September 30. The consent decree commits the combined company to at least $1.5 billion in extra U.S. film and TV production over five years, at least 30 theatrical films a year at the start of that window, and separate negotiation of cable distribution deals. The guild settlement included a payment to the health fund and staffing commitments at CBS News. A last-minute effort to halt the close was denied. Tuesday was the day the companies had circled. Ynon Kreiz, who stepped down as Mattel’s chief executive last week, is co-CEO, running day-to-day operations and the integration. Ellison keeps strategy and creative. Casey Bloys, from HBO, becomes chief content officer over the combined streaming stack. CBS Sports’ David Berson takes combined sports; Warner’s top sports executive, Luis Silberwasser, exits. David Zaslav leaves Warner Bros. Discovery with a package reported in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Gerry Cardinale of RedBird, a backer, called the close a defining moment and pointed at franchises, originals, and sports rights as the assets the owner-operator model is supposed to protect. What “the Same Company” Does and Does Not Mean DC Studios, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, CNN, CBS, HBO, and Paramount+ are under one corporate parent as of Tuesday. They are not one channel. Ellison said last week he did not want a new name to diminish Paramount or Warner Bros. The studios stay as brands. The launch video put the Skydance mark in the middle and the others around it. CNN and CBS News leadership is unchanged for now, Reuters reported, next to an editorial-independence board the states wrote into the settlement. Viewers do not get a single app on Tuesday. Paramount+ and HBO Max are both still live. Combining logins, tech stacks, and slates is the $6 billion job. Cable networks still have to be sold to distributors, and the settlement says those talks happen separately rather than as one bundle forced on a buyer. Theatrical films still have to hit the 30-a-year floor. None of that is automatic because the ticker changed. The debt is the number that does not care about the logo. Eighty billion dollars net is the ballast under a $70 billion revenue line. Cost savings of $6 billion are how the deal model works. “Non-labor” is a promise that engineering and vendors take the first cut. It is not a promise that newsrooms, animation shifts, and mid-level studio jobs are untouched once the first year of integration accounting starts. The Competitive Claim Ellison’s line is that two storied studios together are a stronger competitor, with the talent and reach to tell stories in every genre on every platform. The industry he is competing with is not another studio. It is Netflix, which lost the bidding, and the tech platforms that already outspend a combined Hollywood on a single year’s content budget. A company that owns CBS and CNN can still lose a night to YouTube. A company that owns DC and SpongeBob can still miss a summer. What Tuesday does change is the buyer’s market for talent. One less studio means one less place for a package to go. The states tried to price that in with the film floor and the production spending. Whether 30 films a year is a real slate or a contractual minimum will be visible in the 2027 release calendar, not in the press release. What to Watch SKYD’s first sessions, and whether the debt story leads the equity story. A date for a combined Paramount+ and HBO Max login. Who runs DC Studios, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network once the integration chart is published. Whether the CNN–CBS independence board has a veto. The first slate counted against the 30-film commitment. Warner Bros. and Paramount are one company. The name on the building is Skydance. DC, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, CNN, CBS, HBO, and Paramount+ are now brands in the same portfolio, with $80 billion in debt and a savings target that has not been delivered yet. The close was the easy sentence. The org chart is the rest of the year. Digital8Hub will cover the first SKYD session and any streaming combination date.