According to reports, the future of Paramount has finally been decided, with Skydance Media merging with the famous old studio in a deal worth $8bn.
It’s been a long time coming but the future of Paramount Pictures and its parent company Paramount Global has seemingly been decided. As has long been suspected, the company will be merging with Skydance Media in a deal which is set to be worth around $8bn.
So what does this mean for the future of Paramount Pictures, a storied Hollywood institution? Shari Redstone – the controlling stakeholder in Paramount Global – is said to have favoured the Skydance Media bid over a competing bid that reportedly involved Sony) because Skydance had expressed a desire to keep the company whole rather than purchasing it and then selling off its assets. She’s taken a lower price to ensure this happens, and fair play to her. Even though she’s going to be okay to pay for Christmas dinner, it does feel as though this may be the best outcome for Paramount and its employees.
While it’s too early to say for sure, we hope that this indicates that Paramount Pictures will continue to operate as a fully-functioning studio, rather than become little more than a imprint owned by another company (in the way that MGM or 20th Century Studios, other storied Hollywood studios sold off by their owners) now operate.
The process of trying to sell Paramount Global has been a lengthy one for its parent company National Amusements. The world is in a tough economic environment right now (you can count on us for such exclusives), and as such, no bidders have jumped in to throw massive bids in the direction of Paramount Global in the fashion that we saw Disney do when purchasing 20th Century Fox for $70bn back in 2019.
Instead, in a world where streaming no longer looks like a flawless business model, companies have seemed rather wary about taking on Paramount’s varied assets, with lots of them (such as its cable TV business) not looking like long-term profit-makers.
One executive who might know how to harness the potential of Paramount is David Ellison, the company’s inbound boss. The head of Skydance Media has partnered his company with Paramount to produce some of the studio’s biggest tentpole hits over the last few years, including Top Gun: Maverick and the Mission: Impossible films. While the offer from Sony and investment firm Apollo was said to be three times larger than the $8bn offered by Skydance and Redbird Capital, this is the bid that will hopefully keep more people in gainful employment and secure the future of the beloved film studio.
Time will tell. We’ll bring you more on the future of Paramount as we hear it.
