Paramount Closes $110 Billion Warner Bros. Discovery Merger, Forming Skydance

Paramount Skydance completed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday, closing one of the largest media mergers on record and formally creating a new company called Skydance. Trading under the ticker SKYD began the same day, capping a deal that was first announced more than a year ago and nearly collapsed multiple times under regulatory and legal pressure.

The deal had cleared its final hurdle just hours before closing, when Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan denied a last-minute bid to halt it. The combined company brings together two of Hollywood's five major film studios along with the Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services, networks including CBS, CNN, MTV, TBS, Comedy Central, and Food Network, and franchises spanning "The Lord of the Rings," "Game of Thrones," the DC Universe, "Harry Potter," "Mission: Impossible," and "Yellowstone." Skydance is expected to generate nearly $70 billion in combined annual revenue, instantly making it one of the largest media companies in the world by content library alone.

Under the terms of the deal, Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders will receive the cash equivalent of roughly $31 per share. The new company will be led by CEO David Ellison, who orchestrated the merger after taking control of Paramount earlier this year, alongside co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, the former Warner Bros. Discovery chief. Analysts say the pairing of the two executives is intended to steady the transition as the companies integrate overlapping divisions, a process that historically has led to layoffs and consolidated production slates in past media mergers.

The merger's path to completion was anything but smooth. Paramount settled a July lawsuit from a coalition of twelve state attorneys general and a separate suit from the Writers Guild of America, both of which had sought to block the deal on antitrust grounds, arguing that combining two of the industry's largest studios and streaming platforms would reduce competition for writers, actors, and production crews. As part of the settlement, Paramount Skydance pledged to produce at least 30 films in each of the next two years and agreed not to sell or close the Paramount or Warner Bros. studio lots in Los Angeles for at least five years.

Those commitments will shape how the newly combined studio operates in the near term, even as questions remain about how Skydance will eventually consolidate two major streaming services with overlapping content libraries and subscriber bases. Industry analysts expect the integration of Paramount+ and HBO Max to be one of the most closely watched streaming decisions of the next year, with implications for pricing, bundling, and content availability for tens of millions of subscribers.