Skydance's Bold Moves Could Reshape Hollywood's Future by Year's End
The head of Skydance, David Ellison, has been talking about the first of two major deals he's been involved with. Work continues on Skydance's acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, and when that completes (eventually), there's going to be even more noise around that. But for the minute, Ellison has been telling a posh conference about the amount of money he's planning to save off the back of the Paramount deal first.
The initial projections were for some $3bn in savings by merging Skydance and Paramount, which inevitably is pointing towards significant job losses. For the minute, Ellison has been talking about the technology stack, the systems and tech that are running the businesses. "We're in the process of basically converging Paramount+, BET+ and Pluto all into one unified tech stack. We're going to finish that second quarter of this year" he told the no-doubt rapt crowd. He's now talking about how the firm is going to save even more money than originally planned from the work he's been doing.
Coming around the corner is the $6bn in cost savings that the Warner Bros Discovery deal is promising, but Ellison remains coy on the scale of job cuts that's going to involve. "A lot" seems to be a fairly decent guess at this stage, though.
Ellison, as part of his address, was also ominously talking about AI as a "phenomenal tool for the creative community." I beg to differ. It's a phenomenal tool for those looking to make short term cost savings around creative work, but less so for those doing the actual craft. But what do I know? David Ellison is a multi-billionaire, and here I am banging words out in a small room in the West Midlands.
Deadline has more on his remarks, here. The Warner Bros deal is currently expected to close in the autumn. Might copy and paste this story and run it again then...
