When David Ellison saved Paramount from being swallowed up by Sony two years ago, he was perceived around town as a hero. Now that’s he’s in the pole position to take over Warner Bros, the last thing he wants to be known as is the guy who collapsed Hollywood.
On Monday’s call with Wall Street analysts, the Paramount CEO began by identifying himself “as a producer and lifelong fan of film and television.” Few if any entertainment conglom chief executives refer to themselves as producers, and it seemed like it was Ellison’s way of quelling the anxiety and ire that’s out there as the motion picture industry stands poised to lose its second major studio in seven years.
“Similar to how sound forced an upheaval in Hollywood and brought the end of the silent era, so will this Paramount-Warner Bros merger wreck the current motion picture industry as we know it,” one tentpole screenwriter-producer tells Deadline.
“This is the most anticompetitive merger that violates the fundamental principles of the Sherman Antitrust Act,” a notable rival studio insider said. “It’s purely a horizontal combination in an industry that’s already consolidated. The seventh and eighth biggest airlines, JetBlue and Spirit, weren’t allowed to merge, and now the No. 2 and No. 5 studio are being allowed. It’s a f*cking joke.”
Of utmost concern of course is the $6 billion in synergies the new Paramount-WBD will achieve (“that’s not paper in the copy machine, those are actual people,” the same insider cries). However, Ellison said this morning the combined entity would seek efficiencies through non-labor sources (e.g., the tech stack and cloud providers for Paramount+ and HBO Max, optimizing spending on agencies, etc.).
News of the merger for Warner Bros staffers is no doubt an Alka-Seltzer moment: If Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos promised the least amount of duplication, how does Paramount financially justify two different marketing and distribution teams?
Above all this morning, Ellison reiterated his promise: “We have no intention to pull back on production. We obviously intend to make 30 movies a year, basically 15 films from Paramount, 15 films from Warner Bros.”
While a Netflix-Warner Bros merger brought fears over whether the theatrical window would get crunched (despite Sarandos saying on the merger trail he wouldn’t do that, contrary to his previous words and actions in the theatrical space), that’s less the worry with Paramount-Warner Bros. Rather, it’s how do you pull off a major studio release schedule of 30 titles considering the most that have unspooled recently by a major studio was Universal’s 20 titles last year (a total that included Focus Features).
Exhibitors trade org Cinema United doesn’t think it’s possible. “There aren’t 30 dates on the calendar” is a common criticism heard.
With the Paramount-Warner Bros Discovery merger expected to close during Q3 (subject to regulatory clearances and WBD shareholder approval), we’ve pieced together the Q4 2026 and calendar-year 2027 slates of the combined studios. A Paramount-Warner Bros slate in 2027 alone already counts 27 movies. There’s also four times the two studios are dated against each other during that 14-month span.
Many studios have avoided flooding the dead zone of the release-date calendar post-Covid, meaning there are dates up for grabs in January, early February, sometimes mid-spring, late September and October. Forget box office forecasts and data around what is and isn’t possible, but consider relationships with filmmakers: How do you explain to one that their Paramount tentpole is following in the wake of a Warner Bros one, or vice versa? Will Warner Bros and Paramount be allowed to compete against each other? Typically, individual labels at a major studio won’t compete with each other.
“If you can deliver on 30 movies year, and keep the two divisions separate — I’m not sure I can do that, but if [Ellison] can do that, more power to him,” Charles Roven, producer of Oscar winner Oppenheimer and DC Films, told us during this weekend’s PGA Awards. “The most important to me is making sure the theatrical experience is alive and well. He’s promised to keep the theatrical experience alive.”
No doubt, against a studio like Disney with its tentpole labels Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, 20th Century Studios, etc., a Paramount-Warner Bros merger can now compete with its myriad franchises including The Conjuring, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the DC Universe, Star Trek, Sonic the Hedgehog, Top Gun, Transformers, A Quiet Place and Mission: Impossible. Paramount lost Marvel to Disney in August 2009, a move that transferred an immense balance of box office power to the Mouse House. How in God’s name did Paramount ever give that up? A former Paramount executive once admitted to us with a shrug: “We thought we were gangster. We thought we could get away with Star Trek, Transformers and DreamWorks Animation at the time.”). A Paramount-Warner Bros marriage makes the Melrose Ave. lot more competitive again.
Here’s some box office reality, and it explains why Paramount is so aggressive to get its hands on Warner Bros from a theatrical standpoint: From 2021-2025, the five years since Covid, Warners has outstripped Paramount four times at the global box office. The only exception was 2022, the year of Top Gun: Maverick, when the Melrose Avenue lot edged the Burbank lot, $2.6 billion to $2.45 billion. Last year repped the first time that Warners grossed north of $4 billion globally since 2019. That feat was pulled off thanks to the slate from motion picture chairs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy. If Paramount and Warner Bros had combined last year, the two studios would have totaled $5.77B, second to Disney’s $6.58B. If Paramount and Warners had been united since the end of Covid, their highest gross would have been in 2023 with a combined $5.9B worldwide, which would have put them ahead of Universal ($4.9B, the year’s actual B.O. leader) and Disney ($4.8B).
Speaking of production executives with a winning a streak, the multimillion-dollar question is whether De Luca and Abdy stay aboard post-merger. When we asked them on the morning of Oscar nominations whether they’d stay the course when a new owner arrives (at the time it could have been Netflix or Paramount), De Luca answered: “We’re hoping to stay the course. I think 2025 is a proof of concept. It points to what is wonderful about the legacy of this studio, and we’re trying to build on that.”
“I have to believe that anybody who is interested in this studio would want to see that legacy continue,” he added.
Reps around town also question whether Ellison can stick to his claim of wanting to increase the output of films specifically since production isn’t exactly in high gear at the studio since the Skydance-Paramount deal closed in August. Shortly after Skydance acquired Paramount, the studio was busy spending money on new deals with talent like the Duffer brothers and landing Call of Duty rights, but actual productions are few and far between as we head into the end of first-quarter 2026. The Christmas Carol film Ebenezer starring Johnny Depp is about to wrap production, but the only other films to start production since the merger in August are the Western thriller The Rescue, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 and the Untitled Jackass Movie.
Says one producer, “Nothing has moved at the pace that I would like things to go since Skydance bought Paramount. Things just slowed down a bit since their courtship of Warner Bros. Everyone is in a wait-and see-mode.”
While some reps are concerned about David and dad Larry Ellison’s antics with Donald Trump of late (read David Ellison, a longtime Democratic Party donor, attending POTUS’ State of the Union address last week. In addition, there was the greenlighting of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour sequel coming off his directing work on the Amazon MGM Studios’ Melania documentary), there’s also a quotient that believes that there’s no way Paramount-Warner Bros is bound to become conservative ala Angel Studios. When it comes to any kind of right-leaning tendencies coming out of the new merger, Hollywood power players are less concerned about the motion picture division and more worried about the future of CNN.
Not everyone is losing their head over the pending Paramount-Warner Bros union.
The Studio co-creator Alex Gregory told us at the PGAs, “It’s all prognostication at this point. Everyone can guess what’s going to happen, but no one really knows. We hope that they just want to keep making great TV and movies.”
“I’m optimistic,” adds Top Gun: Maverick producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “David loves movies, he’s gonna make a lot of movies, you just gotta give him good scripts.”
There’s also the hope that in times of consolidation and less competition, new theatrical players will arise.
“Netflix is getting $2.8 billion — that’s an impressive consolation prize,” one exhibitor says. “Perhaps they should go start up their own global theatrical distribution arm.”
Justin Kroll contributed to this article.