Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison announced Friday that the combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will be renamed Skydance once the companies complete their merger next week, retiring both legacy names in favor of the studio brand Ellison founded in 2006.
The deal, struck in February, carries a value of roughly $110 billion on an enterprise basis, making it one of the largest media combinations in Hollywood history. Closing is expected within days, at which point Warner Bros. Discovery stops trading as a standalone company.
The rebranding means the 102-year-old Warner Bros. name — home to Batman, Harry Potter, and the Looney Tunes library — will no longer appear on the corporate masthead, though Ellison did not say whether the Warner Bros. studio label will survive on film and television credits.
Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, took control of Paramount in 2024 through a Skydance merger with the Redstone family's holding company. He has since pushed the studio toward consolidation, arguing that scale is required to compete with Netflix, Disney, and Amazon for streaming subscribers and production talent.
The combined company will hold two major film studios, the Paramount+ and Max streaming services, and cable channels including CNN, TNT, TBS, MTV, and Comedy Central. That portfolio spans news, sports rights, and scripted franchises that individually rank among the most-watched properties on television.
Regulators in the United States and abroad reviewed the transaction for antitrust concerns before clearing it. Paramount Skydance shareholders approved the deal in a vote earlier this year.
Warner Bros. Discovery was itself formed in 2022 when AT&T spun off WarnerMedia and combined it with Discovery Inc., a deal valued at about $43 billion at the time. The company has since written down billions in cable network value as viewers migrated to streaming, a decline that helped push it toward a sale.
Ellison has not disclosed the leadership structure of the new Skydance, including whether Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav will remain with the company. Zaslav's pay package and exit terms were among the details negotiated during the merger talks.
The name change takes effect at closing. Shares of both companies will consolidate under a single ticker, though Ellison did not specify which exchange symbol the new Skydance will use.
