- Paramount Global’s board of directors approved the merger with Skydance on Sunday.
- It marks the end of a messy deal process and the beginning of a new era for the troubled media giant.
- Skydance’s David Ellison will become CEO of Paramount.
Paramount Global, the struggling media giant that owns CBS and Nickelodeon, has agreed to merge with David Ellison’s production company Skydance Media to create “New Paramount,” the companies announced late Sunday night.
The merger was reported by multiple media outlets on Sunday.
The announcement marks the end of a turbulent transaction process and the beginning of a new chapter for Paramount.
As Business Insider’s Peter Kafka previously noted, Paramount has struggled in recent years to adapt to a digital audience, and according to Bloomberg, the company still expects to derive all of its profits for 2023 from its traditional TV networks, even amid the industry’s digital shift.
Ellison plans to “improve profitability, promote stability and independence for creators, and enable further investment in fast-growing digital platforms,” the companies said in a statement on Sunday.
The company announced in February that it would lay off 800 employees worldwide, despite Super Bowl 55 drawing record viewership across its networks and streaming platform Paramount+.
The layoffs come on the heels of Paramount being identified as a takeover target late last year, after the company was in talks with Warner Bros., Discovery CEO David Zaslav, producer Byron Allen and private equity firm Apollo Global Management, among others, about a possible merger.
But CNBC reported last month that Shari Redstone, the media heiress who controls Paramount Global through her holding company National Amusements, preferred the deal with Skydance because a merger would keep Paramount intact.
Negotiations with the studio, owned by the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and responsible for blockbuster hits such as “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” have been ongoing since at least the beginning of this year, according to The New York Times.
Redstone was interested in merging with Skydance, but talks shifted direction in the following months and the deal was nearly killed by Redstone’s lawyers in June, The New York Times reported.
The deal was revived on Tuesday, with the Redstone family reaching a tentative agreement to sell National Amusements to Skydance, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The companies said in an announcement Sunday that the merger would value Skydance at $4.75 billion.
The companies announced Sunday that David Ellison will become chairman and CEO of Paramount. He became president of NBCUniversal last year.
