Paramount Skydance Bids to Buy Warner Bros. Discovery

It’s a strange time to be a filmmaker. Consolidation has taken a lot of buyers and jobs from us, and it seems as if we're going to lose another.

Reports have come out claiming Paramount Skydance is exploring a bid to buy Warner Bros. — a move that would take another studio off the table.

Yeah, you read that right. The studio that brought you The Godfather and Mission: Impossible might be teaming up with the home of Batman, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones.

It’s a mega-deal that could create a Hollywood behemoth.

Let’s dive in.

Terms of the Deal

Warner Bros. Discovery's market cap is around $39.8 billion, and Paramount's is about $17.95 billion.

So if they combined, you could see a studio worth almost $60 billion, though I'll leave those numbers to the professional prognosticators.

It would be a massive place that has IP spanning many different worlds and franchises that would instantly create a powerhouse.

Combining the content libraries and subscriber bases of Paramount+ would finally create a profitable streamer and help shrink a landscape that's become too big and unsustainable.

It's hard to know anything else based on preliminary reports.

The Ever-Shrinking Hollywood Landscape

It will be a very long road to know what happens with a deal like this. It would have to pass the Justice Department, and there are so many moving parts.

The first worry is redundancies and more playoffs, which have already rocked Hollywood.

After that, the most obvious takeaway is that there might be one less place to sell your script. A combined Paramount/Warner Bros. would mean one less studio to pitch to, one less executive to email, and one less chance to get your foot in the door.

For those of us who have been in this game for a while, this is a familiar story. We’ve seen Disney swallow Fox, and now this.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned: you can’t control what happens in the boardrooms of these massive corporations. All you can control is what you put on the page.

Summing It All Up

At the end of the day, we can’t predict the future. We don’t know if this merger will actually happen, or what it will mean for the industry if it does.

Now, I want to hear from you. What do you think about this potential merger? Are you excited? Worried?

Let me know in the comments.