Skydance becomes official Tuesday when the $111 billion Paramount Warner Bros. merger closes.
David Ellison says the new company is “a creative-first home for bold, quality storytelling.”
Here is what the first week actually looks like.
The two executives who just won Warner Bros. Best Picture were fired through a press leak, and the biggest hitmaker in television already left for the competition.
The HBO boss behind the most backlash-heavy slate on TV is staying, and so is James Gunn and his divisive DCU.
So much for creative-first.
Who Stays: Casey Bloys, Rafe Judkins, And James Gunn
Ellison is keeping Casey Bloys, with HBO’s big producers having lobbied to keep him.
Bloys is set to run all of streaming, while Cindy Holland, the streaming chief Ellison’s own Paramount hired, is out.
So the reports that Ellison only values loyalty and his own people seem exaggerated. He kept the holdover from the old regime and cut his own hire.
Bloys is the executive behind House of the Dragon, Euphoria, and Lanterns.
He is also behind HBO’s Harry Potter series, which managed to spark months of fan backlash before airing a single episode over the casting of a Black Snape.
Ellison also just signed Rafe Judkins to an exclusive overall deal at Paramount Television Studios.
Judkins ran Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time, the fantasy disaster Amazon canceled after three seasons of fans torching it for ditching Robert Jordan’s books.
That is who the new regime is betting on for its next big genre series.
And James Gunn and Peter Safran are staying put, at least for now, with their DC Studios contracts running through April 2027.
Gunn’s divisive DCU just delivered Supergirl, the lowest-grossing DC movie ever. Clayface is up next and shaping up to be another big bomb.
So when the reports say De Luca and Abdy got shown the door over box office, remember that the executive behind the biggest DC bomb in history still has his job.
Ironically, Gunn’s own fans are now turning on him, too. When he shared Skydance’s promo video on Friday, DC fans filled the replies telling him to “blink twice” and joked he only posted it to keep his job.
Taylor Sheridan Already Walked
Taylor Sheridan built Paramount+. Yellowstone, Landman, Tulsa King, Lioness, Mayor of Kingstown, 1923.
The service runs on his shows.
Sheridan is gone. He signed a five-year deal with Comcast’s NBCUniversal last fall, within months of Ellison taking over Paramount, reported to be worth up to $1 billion.
His movies move over this year, and his TV output follows when the Paramount deal runs out at the end of 2028.
Why? Reportedly, things went south with David Ellison.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Ellison and a planeload of executives flew to Sheridan’s Texas ranch to keep him, the meeting produced nothing, and Paramount never made a counter offer.
One source told the outlet, “Ellison wants to run the show and he can’t with Sheridan there.”
Puck added that Cindy Holland had been questioning Sheridan’s budgets.
Sheridan makes shows for regular Americans in the middle of the country. The television side of Skydance now answers to the HBO boss who greenlights Euphoria.
Those two things do not go together, and the one creator who reliably delivered that audience saw it coming and left.
De Luca And Abdy Take The Fall For A James Gunn Movie
Per TheWrap, De Luca and Abdy found out they were done the same way everybody else did, by reading about it online Thursday night in a report put out by Puck News, which is backed by the same investors backing Paramount-WBD.
Ellison reportedly called De Luca and Abdy Friday morning – the next day – and cited the combined company’s roughly $80 billion in debt, and contrary to Deadline’s report, offered no production deal.
Their last day is expected to be Tuesday, when the merger completes.
Abdy’s response to Ellison, per TheWrap: “Good luck to you. I left you 39 movies.”
https://x.com/sharonwaxman/status/2106253253684212033
Here is the part the reports keep getting wrong. The trades list Supergirl under De Luca and Abdy.
Supergirl is a James Gunn movie. It came out of DC Studios, which Gunn and Safran run. DC Studios is staying.
https://x.com/franklinleonard/status/1958909014651412922
De Luca spelled out his whole philosophy in an interview with Franklin Leonard last year: “You cannot do the job like you’re afraid to get fired.”
Work scared, De Luca said, and innovation dies. You end up making the same movie over and over, and the audience moves on.
That is the entire point. De Luca and Abdy were not the ones making everything the same.
And yes, Digger is a bomb. It opened this weekend to around $8 million.
But nobody at a studio says no to Tom Cruise, the guy who built modern Paramount, and the guy Ellison is paying right now for Days of Thunder 2.
As for the rest of the slate, our insiders explained it back in September:
“Most of their slate this year was a lot of low-to-mid budget horror due to the sale and transition of WB, and creative accommodation for someone like Tom Cruise to keep him happy as a trade off for his franchise movies,” the insider explained.
“The massive bomb was under James Gunn with Supergirl,” the insider continued. “Dune is still coming and that’s going to be massive.”
Dune: Part Three opens December 18. De Luca and Abdy developed it. The new regime gets to take the credit. Same with Minecraft 2, Lord of the Rings, Batman 2, et al.
A Tech Company, Not A Movie Studio
Ellison’s stated reason for the firings was cost.
That lines up with what our insiders already told us. Larry Ellison, not David, brought in Mattel’s Ynon Kreiz as Co-CEO to “cut cut cut,” with a mandate to find billions in savings.
Per those same sources, Larry and Kreiz made the call on De Luca and Abdy.
So look at the track records now in charge.
Kreiz comes straight from Mattel, where Masters of the Universe just bombed with a loss in the hundreds of millions and no sequel in sight.
Barbie toy sales are also back at or below where they sat before the movie. Mattel’s own earnings had Barbie down 21 percent in North America to start the year.
Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, the Paramount co-chairs now running both film studios, have Street Fighter up first on October 16.
Estimates have it opening between $30 million and $40 million. Masters of the Universe opened to $29.4 million.
The number has at least been climbing since the summer, but that is the neighborhood.
Vulture ran its story on the firings under the headline “It’s Going to Be a Disaster.”
A corporate strategist told the outlet, “Ellison wants his own people.” A Paramount insider said the job is too big for Greenstein and Goldberg and that producers have no respect for them.
https://x.com/vulture/status/2106185300712259895
Reports already have Ellison courting former Disney TV chief Peter Rice for a job above them both.
IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson called the exit a bad thing for cinema, flat out.
She points out that Ellison’s own producing track record is Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and Terminator movies, and that he never would have greenlit One Battle After Another, the film that just won Warner Bros. Best Picture. You can add Sinners to the list.
https://x.com/akstanwyck/status/2106058016718032931
Skydance is also legally committed to releasing 30 movies a year for the next two years.
Are all of them going to be hits? Far from it. Flops come with the job. That is the business De Luca was describing.
What Ellison did is sacrifice creatives for cost.
Maybe he and his multibillionaire father are banking on fans showing up simply because the company got bigger. Disney tried that arrogance with Star Wars and Marvel, and it sent fans packing.
Or maybe they just don’t care.
Cap the budgets, settle for bottom-of-the-barrel numbers, and treat James Gunn’s DC grosses as the baseline support zone.
Either way, the new Skydance sounds less and less like a movie studio and more like something run out of Silicon Valley.
A tech company where everything gets reduced to ones and zeros.
