The Skydance/Paramount Merger is Back On
#TheDarkHeraldWasRight As I said, “Redstone is hot to sell and Skydance is hot to buy, so this is now just negotiating.”
The walking away from the table was just another negotiating ploy. Turns out that Shari Redstone was trying to get to the price she wanted, and she appears to have gotten there. Skydance and Paramount have agreed to a merger.
Shari Redstone’s worthless stock will now be turned into something valuable. Namely 8 billion bucks. At the time of their merger CBS/Viacom and Paramount were separately valued at $24 billion… EACH. This is theoretically a good deal for Skydance. Paramount does have $14.6 billion in debt, a leftover of their own efforts at Chasing the $20 Billion Dragon of streaming.
National Amusements, owned by Shari Redstone (for the moment) is the legal entity that owns Paramount Entertainment. Which means that this is going to be a very clean merger. Legally speaking Skydance is just acquiring National Amusements and Paramount just comes along for the ride as a subsidiary. The regulators don’t have much to complain about. Skydance is mostly David Ellison’s super producer shingle than any kind of real studio.
He’s already provided Paramount with a new logo in Skydance font, which they have promptly adopted like good do-bees. There are quite a few people worried about redundancies and rightfully so. Nickelodeon gets a much-needed new boss in John Lassetter. David Ellison will be acting as Chairman and CEO, which is usually terrible for corporate governance, however Skydance is privately held anyway.
And the truth is, Paramount can’t really do any worse under Ellison’s leadership than it has the cabal of Hollywood cluelessness that has run it off the side of a cliff. Like every other studio that gambled on its own streaming service, Paramount+ came up snake eyes. Streaming was Plan A and there was no Plan B. Paramount+ started life as CBS All-Access. It really wasn’t bringing anything to the party that wasn’t already there. The flagship show was the utterly disastrous Star Trek: Discovery. The executive team just plain sucks. Paramount has IPs that are potentially worth more than the company at this point but they have been absolutely squandered in the most Disneyesque ways imaginable.
In a nutshell, Paramount has been Disney without the money.
Everyone in Hollywood is wondering what Skydance/Paramount is going to do with its moribund IPs. They hold Tom Clancy’s IP rights and if the year was 1986 they’d be set. But it’s 2024 and they really don’t know what to do with it. Anti-terrorism? Anti-Russia? Anti-China? There is no one left in Hollywood that has a clue what the right wing wants. Arguably the right wing doesn’t really know either.
They have another Mission Impossible movie mostly in the can but the last one bombed. Admittedly it had a shitload of bad luck; everything from Covid production restrictions to losing its IMAX screens to having Sound of Freedom eat half its lunch. Maybe the next one will do better but the franchise is now under a cloud.
The rest is stuff like Spy Kids, Popeye, Death Wish, GI Joe, Jimmy Neutron, TMNT, Transformers, and Terminator. There is nothing bringing the crowds in.
The biggest treasure at Paramount isn’t the moribund IPs. It is CBS’s Sports contracts. Right now the Tiffany Network owns half of the NFL’s broadcasting rights. That is the real prize here, the rest is just trinkets compared to that. Unlike Disney, Larry Ellison has enough mega-bucks to hang on to his son’s sports contracts.
Darklings: What about Star Trek?
Dark Hearld: *sigh* I was afraid you’d ask about that. Truthfully, I’d manage your expectations if I was you. Dreamworks is the company that brought in JJ Abrams in the first place, he still has connections with Skydance and he is still trying to get his version of Star Trek IV off the ground. The last Star Trek movie of his was in 2016 and JJ appears to be suffering from necrophilia when it comes to Kirk and company, he won’t give it up no matter how dead it is. As for Alex Kurtzman, Glob only knows what was in the contract he got Paramount to sign. I’ve even heard rumors that he got an ownership stake in the IP. You would have to be eight kinds of retard to have given that to him with his shitty performance record. But Bob Bakish was, unquestionably, stupid enough to do that. There was a reason Shari Redstone had him thrown from the rooftops right before the last earnings call.
There is only two very dim hopes for Star Trek’s future. One David Ellison is no innovator, he just follows trends. When JJ Abrams was the new hotness, he was panting to work with him. However, JJ is now the guy that killed Star Wars, so Ellison might not be too keen on him at this point. The other is a rumor that John Lassetter is going to be CCO of Paramount. I would take that one with a grain of salt but it is possible.
