The soon-to-merge Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery officially has a name: It’s simply going to be “Skydance,” according to chair and CEO David Ellison.

Ellison picked the name of his original film production company, Skydance Media, to encompass everything that is getting stuffed into the new conglomerate.

The deal forming the new Skydance is set to close Oct. 6, the companies have announced. The merger will combine two of Hollywood’s biggest movie studios; the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services; and TV businesses including CBS, CNN, MTV, TBS, Comedy Central, Food Network and more. The new company’s entertainment franchises will span Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, “Game of Thrones” and other HBO hits, the DC Universe, “Yellowstone,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Top Gun” and the Nickelodeon kids’ empire.

Skydance will be led by chairman and CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, the former Mattel chief who will join the company October 5.

The company plans to move its Class B Common Stock from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange, where it will begin trading on October 6.
The company intends to change the ticker symbol for the stock from “PSKY” to “SKYD.” It also intends to amend its certificate of incorporation to change the company’s name to “Skydance Corporation.”

“Paramount and Warner Bros. shaped over a century of culture,” Ellison wrote in a post on X Friday announcing the Skydance name, the first tweet on a newly created account.

“By combining them, we aren’t rewriting history — we’re equipping these iconic studios with more powerful engine. Together, we are Skydance: a creative-first home for bold, quality storytelling.”

Ellison ultimately prevailed in his yearlong campaign to swing a massive $111 billion deal to merge Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, including outbidding Netflix (which had an agreement to buy Warner Bros.’ streaming and studios businesses) and settling an antitrust lawsuit by 12 states seeking to block the deal.

The Paramount-Warner Bros. deal cleared its last hurdle after a judge overseeing the 12-state antitrust lawsuit on Sept. 30 apprved the settlement between Paramount and the state attorneys general.

Industry wags had playfully dubbed the pending combo as “ParaBros” and “WarnerMount,” but no one expected either one of those to be the official company moniker.

Skydance will have a mountain of debt, projected to be north of $80 billion, after assuming the debt burdens of previous M&A incurred by Paramount and WBD and raising new debt financing. Paramount is issuing about $42.4 billion in bonds and is additionally taking out $8.5 billion and €850 million in new loans to help fund the Warner Bros. deal and repay existing debt.

The new company will be controlled by David Ellison and his father, Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison, alongside Gerry Cardinale, founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners.

According to Paramount, the three Middle Eastern funds will own 38.5% of the combined Paramount-Warner Bros.

In addition to the hiring of Mattel’s Kreiz, the company’s new leadership is coming into focus.

Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, co-heads of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, will leave post-merger, sources told Variety. Paramount film heads Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein are in line to oversee both movie studios.

Casey Bloys, head of WBD’s HBO and HBO Max, is poised to assume oversight of the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. streaming business after Cindy Holland announced to staffers that she was stepping down from her role running Paramount+ and other direct-to-consumer businesses.

Ellison has held preliminary talks with CNN chief Mark Thompson about staying on after the merger. The prospect of Thompson continuing at the helm came as a relief to CNN personnel, who have been worried that Bari Weiss, the “anti-woke” media entrepreneur Ellison put in charge of CBS News and “60 Minutes,” might extend her fiefdom to include the news cabler.

Here’s Ellison’s post announcing the Skydance name, which includes a sizzle reel highlighting the merged companies’ entertainment properties: