Paramount and Warner Bros. Will Be Called Skydance After Their Merger

The $110 billion deal is expected to close Tuesday, and Discovery's name won't make it through.

Once Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery finish merging, the company that owns both will be called Skydance, its chief executive, David Ellison, said Friday.

Ellison announced the name in a post on X. The $110 billion deal is expected to close Tuesday, October 6, after Ellison spent a year chasing Warner Bros. and two months waiting out antitrust suits filed by 12 states and the Writers Guild of America, Deadline reported. A judge has since approved the legal settlement that cleared the last hurdle.

Skydance is already Ellison's name on the door at Paramount. When his company bought Paramount in August 2025, it kept the famous studio name out front and tucked Skydance behind it. First that was "Paramount, a Skydance Corporation." Later it was trimmed to "Paramount Skydance Corporation."

Picking a name this time was trickier. The states and the guild had called the deal an illegal monopoly, and the settlement that ended their suits is a five-year consent decree that keeps some Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery operations apart. It's also written to keep either major studio from being dissolved, a fear the merger's opponents had raised. A name that looked like it crowned one side would've been a problem of its own, Deadline reported.

Ellison said he wanted both studios' histories to survive under one roof. "We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one," he wrote on X. His pitch for the new name: "Together, we are Skydance: a creative-first home for bold, quality storytelling."

The name that doesn't survive is Discovery. Discovery Communications went public in 2008, two decades after the Discovery Channel first went on the air, and it won't be part of what the combined company calls itself. Before Friday, the merger had been getting by on unofficial nicknames like "WarnaMount" and "ParaBros."

At the top of the Warner Bros. film studio, the bosses are leaving. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, the studio's film chiefs, are out, The Hollywood Reporter found, and Deadline reported that their last day is Tuesday, the same day the deal is expected to close.

Over at DC Studios, James Gunn and Peter Safran are staying for now, The Hollywood Reporter found. Deadline also reported that the pair will stay on after the merger. Richard Brener, who runs New Line, is poised to jump to the merged company, Deadline reported.

The new org chart is filling in fast. Ynon Kreiz has been named co-CEO of the combined company, and George Cheeks will oversee all three of its TV studios, Warner Bros. TV and CBS Studios among them, according to Deadline.

Viewers keep both front doors. Skydance is holding on to the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming brands, Deadline reported, which fits Ellison's promise to keep the old names "in the spotlight."

The deal's backers are counting on about $6 billion in cost savings. Gerry Cardinale, a Paramount backer and the deal's architect, has said most of that money won't come from layoffs, Deadline reported.

Source: deadline.com, retrieved October 3, 2026.