Ellison’s Company, Not The Studios, Gets The Corporate Name

David Ellison said Friday that the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. company will be named Skydance starting Tuesday, putting the name of the company he built above Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., HBO, CBS, CNN, DC Studios, Nickelodeon, Paramount+ and HBO Max.

The choice is not Paramount Warner Bros., Warner Paramount, or a neutral name meant to split the difference between two century-old studios. Ellison said he wants to preserve the Paramount and Warner Bros. identities, not bury them under a new corporate brand, and he has said those labels should remain in the spotlight. Audiences are not expected to seek a Skydance release instead of a Warner Bros. or Paramount film, and keeping the older brands visible makes obvious business sense. The corporate name still shows where control sits.

The decision caps a week in which the shape of the company came into focus. A federal judge approved Paramount’s settlement with 12 state attorneys general, clearing the $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition to close. Wall Street banks completed a roughly $52 billion debt sale tied to the deal. Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz is joining Ellison as co-CEO, and HBO’s Casey Bloys is expected to oversee the combined streaming business. Ellison has asked CNN CEO Mark Thompson to stay and discussed a new contract with him.

Warner Bros. film chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy are expected to leave when the merger closes. They learned from press reports Thursday night that they would not join the merged company before Ellison formally called each of them Friday morning, TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman reported. The conversations were tense. Abdy told Ellison, “Good luck to you. I left you 39 movies.”

Taken together, the week looks less like Paramount adding Warner Bros. Discovery to an existing company than Ellison building something new on top of both. Paramount and Warner Bros. spent more than a century becoming institutions other companies wanted to join. They survived ownership changes, technological upheavals and generations of executives because the brands carried enormous cultural weight. Both are now part of something named for Ellison’s much younger company. That is where the transition gets complicated.