The US$111 billion merger between two of Hollywood’s oldest studios, Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery, is now official. Skydance, the resulting media conglomerate, brings together a suite of companies, including the US CBS network (along with the Ten Network here in Australia), two of the big five Hollywood production studios, and a miscellany of cable and streaming services, including high-profile news company CNN and drama producer HBO.
It’s a rapid consolidation of old media into the latest cultural giant, and marks a worrying leap in the remake of “news”. With David Ellison at the helm — and he and his billionaire tech mogul father owning 77.5% of the voting shares and 47.2% of all shares — it’s also the starkest sign yet that, post Elon Musk’s X-ification of Twitter, billionaire media owners see media as a key weapon in the Anglosphere culture wars.
Skydance is a mish-mash of all the worst houses on the best streets of cultural production, and putting it together will require a lot of repairs. The merger brings together lots of eyeballs — about one in seven of all US TV viewing hours — and piles of debt: a “crushing” A$114 billion. Alongside spiralling global rates amid the data centre boom, the merger is “a dicey bet”, wrote the Murdoch-owned Barron’s newsletter over the weekend.
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The company’s new management has made big promises, such as achieving an annual target of US$6 billion within three years, through the corporate magic of “synergies”, balanced with commitments to support minimum production levels in film and television. Trouble is, it’s a company that urgently needs investment in content, not cuts. It’s well placed off the back of a successful 2025 for Warner Bros, but without the cash injection for a few hits (like Universal’s breakout winner, The Odyssey), it could quickly find itself trailing behind its competitors.
Skydance is also now holding a grab-bag of built-for-cable programming channels from both sides of the merger, and they are struggling in the streaming age. Indeed, the CNN flagship has long lagged Fox News as the news feed of choice in Donald Trump’s America (unsurprisingly, the industry’s trade magazine, Variety, says the mood in CNN’s newsroom is “like a funeral”).
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Meanwhile, it looks like the question has been settled of whether high-end TV drama producer HBO (with its much-touted Harry Potter remake for television coming in December) is a studio or a streamer, with the struggling HBO Max to be folded into a (presumably more expensive) Paramount+. The Ellisons will still have to decide what to do about HBO’s pre-buy of the documentary on fellow billionaire Musk, released to applause at the Cannes festival this year — and to complaints about a “hit piece” from Musk himself.
Free-to-air network CBS is the one major asset in the new corporation that has been more or less working, having dominated ratings (and the advertising dollars that come with it) until the Skydance takeover last year. But its once-stellar news programming has been lagging for more than a decade.
Since editor-in-chief Bari Weiss took the reins in 2025, CBS has pivoted from traditional news to right-wing opinionista fantasmagoria, with the evening news relaunched into a ratings slide, lightly watched conservative talk forums rescheduled in prime-time, 60 Minutes shaken up with a turnover in presenters and producers to give it a more conservative take, and radio news wound back. It had also previously — and controversially — axed The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Australian audiences have long been waiting for some of the CBS magic to rub off on local television’s perpetual laggard, the Ten Network, which CBS bought out of receivership in 2017. Will it now get the same sort of scrubdown here, too? Perhaps, unless it’s sold to help with debt.
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But all this media consolidation isn’t (or isn’t mainly) about making money; the tech bros already have plenty of that. It’s not even about buying status anymore, as with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post in the long-lost Obama years. The billionaires are looking to turn up the trumpets on the right-wing noise machine and drown out their critics.
Takeovers used to come with pinky promises to keep things much as they were. Now, they come with a commitment to make the merged companies more effective as front-line fighters in the culture wars. The quiet bits can be said out loud, like X-owner Musk’s tirades against “the woke mind virus”, and even declared with braggadocio, like Rupert Murdoch’s apparent vision of News Corp as the “protector of the conservative voice in the English-speaking world”.
Sometimes — particularly at the regulation-heavy beginning — it can come a bit coded. As Skydance’s inaugural CEO David Ellison put it last week, “We want to be in the truth business,” whatever that may mean. Well, Donald Trump seems to know, saying last week: “It’s gonna be a great company. They’re terrific people, and it’s gonna be a great company. That’s a great merger.”
There is no indication yet, however, as to when (or whether) the US president will allow CNN back into the White House.