Paramount Global, the troubled media giant that owns CBS and Nickelodeon, has agreed to merge with David Ellison’s Skydance Media production company, creating “New Paramount,” the companies announced late Sunday evening.
The merger was reported earlier on Sunday by multiple outlets.
Paramount has struggled in recent years to adapt to a generation of viewers going digital, as Business Insider’s Peter Kafka previously noted. Even amid the industry’s digital shift, Paramount made all of its profit in 2023 just from traditional TV networks, according to Bloomberg.
Ellison plans to “improve profitability, foster stability and independence for creators, and enable more investment in faster growing digital platforms,” the companies said on Sunday.
In February, the company announced a layoff of 800 employees worldwide despite seeing record viewers during Super Bowl LVIII across its networks and streaming platform, Paramount+.
The layoffs occurred shortly after Paramount became an acquisition target late last year. The company had discussed potential mergers with Warner Bros., Discovery CEO David Zaslav, producer Byron Allen, and private-equity firm Apollo Global Management, among others.
But Shari Redstone, the media heir who owns a controlling stake in Paramount Global through her holding company National Amusements, preferred a deal with Skydance because the merger would keep Paramount intact, CNBC reported last month.
Talks with the production studio — which helped make blockbuster hits like “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” and is owned by the son of Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison — have been ongoing since at least the beginning of the year, according to The New York Times.
While Redstone was drawn to a merger with Skydance, negotiations took several turns in the following months, with a deal nearly killed in June by Redstone’s lawyers, the Times reported.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal was revived on Tuesday, when the Redstone family made a preliminary agreement to sell National Amusements to Skydance.
The merger values Skydance at $4.75 billion, the companies said in Sunday’s announcement.
The companies said on Sunday that David Ellison will be chairman and CEO of Paramount. Jeff Shell, who was fired from his role as CEO of NBCUniversal last year, will be the president.
