Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison speaks during the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on October 9, 2025.
AFP via Getty Images
When I wrote at the end of last year that Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison’s pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery would likely make him the next Rupert Murdoch, both media titans already shared plenty of similarities.
They’re each second-generation media entrepreneurs, for example, who turned family fortunes into sprawling empires. Murdoch’s key moment came during the early days of cable TV, while Ellison’s era is dominated by streaming, AI, and consolidation plays.
To that latter point, as Paramount’s proposed takeover of WBD gets closer to the finish line, the comparison between both men gets even harder to miss.
Once the deal closes, Ellison won’t just be running another Hollywood studio. He’ll be in charge of a media portfolio that spans movies, TV, streaming, news, sports and gaming. The kind of Murdoch-ian collection of assets, in other words, that few executives have ever had under their purview at one time.
The scale of David Ellison’s media empire
There’s one detail that underscores the scale of the merger all by itself: Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures—two studios that stretch back more than 100 years, all the way back to the golden age of Hollywood—will both live on the same balance sheet. On that same note, the combined Paramount-WBD would also encompass New Line Cinema, DC Studios, Paramount Animation, Warner Animation Group and Ellison’s own Skydance Media.
Streaming, meanwhile, will also give Ellison a big lineup of brands. The company will own HBO Max, Paramount+, Pluto TV, Discovery+, BET+ and a collection of smaller streamers that range from premium subscription platforms to free ad-supported TV.
“By uniting the iconic, basically, libraries of Paramount and the iconic libraries of Warner Brothers, we now have a library of 15,000 films,” Ellison said in a March CNBC interview. “When you put Paramount+ and HBO MAX together, you get to over 200 million basically gross subscribers … That puts us in an incredible position to really be able to win in the content space.”
From HBO Max and CNN to CBS News
Its television holdings will be just as substantial. Along with CBS, the merged company will include channels like HBO, TNT, TBS, HGTV, the Food Network, Discovery Channel, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and BET.
Ellison will also oversee both CNN and CBS News, including its crisis-hit show 60 Minutes, along with CBS Sports and TNT Sports. Paramount will likewise control rights to the NFL, NCAA March Madness, Big Ten football and basketball, SEC football and basketball, the NHL, and PGA Tour events.
And all that’s even before you get to the intellectual property.
The company’s catalog will be, in a word, enormous. It’s set to include everything from Batman to Superman, Wonder Woman, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones, plus franchises like Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Transformers and Star Trek. On the TV side, the merged company’s properties will include staples like Friends, The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, Survivor, CSI and South Park.
For now, though, the deal still has some final challenges to sort through.
European regulators confirmed in recent days that Paramount has offered concessions to address competition concerns. Barring any unexpected regulatory hiccups, the merger is expected to close sometime in the third quarter of 2026.
Once the remaining approvals come together, Ellison will find himself running one of the biggest and most culturally influential media companies in the world.
Murdoch, of course, spent decades building his influence through News Corp. and Fox across newspapers, TV, sports and Hollywood. Ellison is getting there via a much different route, but the end result is still the same: Control of one of the few media portfolios with the power to shape what audiences around the world watch every day.
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