The 8 Biggest Headaches Facing New Paramount

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If the story of media scion Shari Redstone’s attempt to sell off Paramount Global to fellow media scion David Ellison were a TV show, it would probably be called Ridiculousness. For nearly two years now, the daughter of late Viacom chief Sumner Redstone has struggled to engineer a deal that would let her fully monetize her inheritance (stakes in both Paramount and National Amusements) while also, in theory, stabilizing and even strengthening her shaky TV empire. To say it hasn’t been easy would be an understatement.

Ellison made it clear to Redstone that he was a willing buyer back in late 2023, but what ought to have been a straightforward path to a merger was delayed and nearly derailed by a series of twists: possible interest from Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast, unwanted bids by private-equity vultures looking to snap up parts of the company, internal rebellion from a renegade CEO, a counteroffer from another billionaire scion. Even after a deal between Redstone and Ellison was finally announced last July, that wasn’t the end of this telenovela. The election of Donald Trump in November unleashed a whole new circle of hell for the two executives, who now had to deal with the president’s petty grievances toward Par-owned CBS News and 60 Minutes, as well as a Trump-appointed FCC chairman determined to leverage his power over approving the sale for his own political purposes. After all manner of hoop-jumping, though, the government finally blessed the alliance between Paramount Global and Skydance on July 23, and — barring another unexpected twist — the two will become one exactly one week from today (August 7).

But while the messiness of the merger process itself may mercifully be coming to an end, the drama is just beginning at what is currently being called New Paramount (and could soon be known as Paramount Skydance, based on the company’s announced stock ticker symbol of PSKY). We know a few things: Ellison will be in charge of the whole enterprise as CEO, former NBCU exec Jeff Shell (who left on less-than-friendly terms) is set to run things day-to-day as president, and, per multiple reports, former Netflix scripted chief Cindy Holland will oversee streaming, while current CBS boss George Cheeks is expected to keep his C-suite role, most likely running a newly supersized broadcast and cable linear portfolio. But beyond that, there are many, many questions about what comes next across the board at New Paramount — TV, film, and streaming.

Are Paramount’s cable properties — including iconic brands such as MTV, Comedy Central, BET, and Nickelodeon — really destined to be spun off or sold?

Since the merger of Skydance and Paramount Global was announced a year ago this month, both Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery have announced plans to spin off big chunks of their basic cable empires — separating them from their growing streaming businesses and forcing networks like E!, USA, MSNBC, CNN, and TNT to fend for themselves. There’s been plenty of industry speculation that New Paramount will do the same with most, if not all, of its cable holdings, if only to please the Wall Street wizards who long ago wrote off traditional TV. In a note to clients last week, TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz argued that “there is a clear opportunity to improve Paramount’s growth profile by letting those assets go, and potentially create shareholder value downstream via a linear network roll-up.” Indeed, even old Paramount had considered divesting itself of some key cable holdings in recent years, exploring (but ultimately rejecting) sales of BET and Showtime. We could see renewed activity on that front once the new team takes over.

And yet, as Creutz also notes, it seems unlikely Ellison & Co. spent billions on Paramount “in order to break it up for parts” by completely getting out of the cable business. For example, Nickelodeon may be a shadow of its former self, but there’s still a ton of valuable IP wrapped up with the network. And while MTV is now best known as the 24/7 Ridiculousness channel, and the brand barely clinging to life, might Ellison not want to see if he and his team can revive it? Or, rather than sell them off, will New Par figure out a way to partner with Comcast and WB Discovery’s respective cable-centric spinoffs, Versant and Discovery Global?

Will CBS remain the last full-service broadcast network — or will it dramatically cut back on scripted series the way its rivals already have?

While CBS CEO George Cheeks has made plenty of budget cuts since taking control of the network in early 2020 — just ask Stephen Colbert — he has maintained the Eye’s status as the broadcaster most invested in scripted programming. CBS’s fall schedule this year boasts 15 first-run dramas and comedies spread across 13 hours, more than ABC (five hours) and NBC (7.5 hours) combined. It’s not that Cheeks hasn’t made concessions to the reality that advertisers, following viewers, have shifted so much of their money to streaming and digital: This fall’s CBS lineup has about 25 percent less scripted than in 2019. Shows which used to churn out 24 or 22 episodes a season are producing fewer episodes every year, and some favorite characters are appearing less often over the season in a nod to shrinking production budgets. But for the most part, as his legacy Big Three competitors struggle to devote even one-third of their prime-time schedules to scripted — and Fox has slimmed down to just two hours one night a week — Cheeks, working with entertainment chief Amy Reisenbach and CBS Studios boss David Stapf, have kept the Eye’s lineup looking not all that different from one a viewer might have seen 15 or 20 years ago. Audiences have rewarded this effort, keeping the network No. 1 in both viewers and key demos, per Nielsen’s linear ratings.

But as the cancellation of the top-rated Late Show With Stephen Colbert underscored, the acquisition by Skydance has changed the equation. This fact was acknowledged in the CBS statement announcing the axing: When Cheeks and his current CEO partners at Paramount called the move “purely a financial decision,” they weren’t just talking about the increasingly awful economics of late night. It was also a tacit acknowledgement that Ellison and Shell have said they plan to achieve billions in cost savings and that those “efficiencies” will almost certainly be found in the broadcast and cable part of the business — a.k.a. Cheeks Country. Against that backdrop, even if you think part of the motivation of canceling Colbert was cozying up to Trump’s FCC — a not unreasonable theory! — putting a metaphorical knife in Colbert’s back can also be seen as a sacrifice to the gods of New Paramount in the hope they might limit the damage to the Eye’s relatively healthy (or at least, healthier) prime-time business. Unfortunately, even if this is the case, it still might not be enough to allow Cheeks to continue shielding CBS from the prime-time downsizing that’s already hit his network’s three main rivals.

Could the merger usher in a renaissance for Paramount’s theatrically distributed movies?

In recent years, the studio responsible for such TCM-anointed cinematic gems as Titanic, The Godfather, Chinatown, and the original Marvel Cinematic Universe entry Iron Man lost its mojo to arguably become Hollywood’s worst-performing back-lot empire. But in an era when every other C-suite chieftain in the industry’s corridors of power is AARP eligible, New Paramount would represent an infusion of fresh blood in the 42-year-old Ellison. (Brian Robbins’s tenure atop the Pictures division remains in limbo.) As the thinking goes, the Oracle tech scion’s stated plan to inject $1.5 billion into the studio’s strained balance sheet will embolden New Paramount to lure top talent and green-light high-profile film packages.

In the plus column, Skydance — which will be absorbed into New Paramount — knows how to produce blockbusters and manage tentpole franchises. The company released a string of Mission: Impossible hits (Fallout: $791.7 million globally, Ghost Protocol: $694.7 million, Rogue Nation: $682.7 million), as well as Top Gun: Maverick ($1.49 billion worldwide). And it resurrected Paramount’s “crown jewel” IP (Skydance’s 2013 Chris Pine–starring Star Trek Into Darkness stands as the sci-fi series’ top-grossing title). Moreover, the 15-year-old media company controls the rights to such hit-or-miss Paramount properties as Terminator, Transformers, and G.I. Joe. Now, according to recent reports, Top Gun 3 is “officially in development” with multiple Star Trek movies also in the works including an origin story and a fourth entry in the Pine–as–Captain Kirk continuum.

All of which is no guarantee Paramount will replicate its golden-era run under ’60s and ’70s studio boss Robert Evans, which yielded Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, and The Great Gatsby. But unlike other recent mega movie-studio mergers — Disney’s swallowing up of Fox, for starters — Skydance has signaled no slowdown in the number of yearly releases. And that’s a net positive for showbiz.

Will former Netflix content guru Cindy Holland radically remake Paramount+, or is that even the goal?

Holland has been serving as a streaming “adviser” to Skydance ever since the company’s Paramount deal was announced a year ago, and as noted earlier, it’s widely expected she’ll be put in charge of the new company’s streaming portfolio of Pluto (more on it later) and Paramount+. P+ is certainly not the sexiest subscription streamer, but it’s actually in pretty decent shape for a platform not named Netflix: It’s got nearly 80 million global subscribers, it’s expected to turn a profit this year, and the regular flow of hits from the CBS Procedural Factory and Taylor Sheridan’s Content Ranch, along with new shows from older IP such as Star Trek and Dexter, has helped it punch above its weight on the Nielsen streaming charts. And thanks to a big check written by current management (with the blessing of Skydance), P+ will soon be the exclusive streaming home of South Park original episodes.

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But while P+ is doing fine, it still feels a long way from being the sort of profit engine New Paramount needs it to be. Holland’s task will be to figure out how to help that cause on the content side, even as she and Ellison (likely with an assist from his father’s Oracle) work to improve the subpar tech on which the platform is currently built, including the atrocious user interface and the seemingly nonexistent recommendation algorithm. Does she lean into the Real America vibes that P+ currently gives off and order up even more Sheridan (and Sheridan-esque) series while partnering more with Cheeks’s CBS on extensions of that network’s many franchises? Or does Holland take advantage of the fact that writers and producers and agents really seem to respect and want to work with her and tap into the relationships she built at Netflix to bring big names into the P+ fold? And if she goes the latter route, will Ellison be willing to make sure Holland has the cash to compete for top-tier projects that currently don’t even get pitched to P+ because agents know the company can’t afford them?

Whither Pluto?

One of the biggest TV-industry crimes of the current decade has been how the last couple of regimes at Paramount have bungled their ownership of free streamer Pluto TV. Eight months before Viacom and CBS announced they were remerging to form Paramount Global, then–Viacom CEO Bob Bakish — in a rare display of foresight — snapped up Pluto for the ridiculously low price of $340 million in cash. Bakish clearly made a bet that free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) would grow in popularity as subscription services started jacking up rates to pay for more and more content, and he was right. Unfortunately, once CBS and Viacom merged, and Bakish had a bigger company to run, he focused all of Par Global’s energy on P+ and started draining resources from Pluto. The result? Pluto plunged from ranking as the No. 1 FAST service on Nielsen’s streaming charts to being an also-ran behind Fox-owned Tubi and the Roku Channel. Pluto still has plenty of viewers and even more potential, but at least in terms of buzz and Nielsen metrics, it’s in a far worse place now than five years ago.

By all accounts, Holland will also have oversight of Pluto and will help determine what happens to it next. The speculation in industry circles in recent months is that New Paramount is poised to either fold Pluto into P+ somehow (rebranding the platform’s current linearlike channels and perhaps marketing it as a free tier of P+) or sell it off altogether. Given the enormous potential of Pluto, plus sister company CBS’s decades of experience running a free TV service, it would be just short of tragic if Pluto as we know it ceases to be. It would make more sense to hand control of Pluto over to Cheeks: Pluto is the one truly linear-forward FAST platform, and it already leads heavily into content from the broadcast and cable networks he’ll oversee.

Could Paramount Animation make a run at Pixar?

A potential shotgun marriage between old Paramount’s Nickelodeon division (which controls beloved kids’-flick properties including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Paw Patrol) and Ellison’s Skydance Animation presents certain complications. Chief among them: In 2023, Skydance struck a megadollar multiyear deal to release its animated fare exclusively on Netflix.

But in John Lasseter — the writer-director-producer of such epochal animated hits as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Cars who served as COO of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios until accusations of sexual misconduct by company subordinates led to his 2017 recusal — Skydance has a genuinely visionary leader. Although none of his projects for the company to date have risen to the cultural saturation point of Lasseter’s Pixar output, industry observers are treating his professional redemption as a kind of foregone conclusion (especially now that Skydance Animation moved into a sprawling, six-acre campus in Santa Monica earlier this summer). Speculation has ranged that until Skydance’s Netflix pact runs out, however, the company could be divided into two separate and distinct cartoon-producing divisions: Skydance Animation under Lasseter and Paramount Animation under current president Ramsey Naito.

Will CBS News as we know it still exist a few years from now?

Leave aside, for a moment, the understandable fears folks have about what Ellison — desperate to get the merger approved — might have promised or hinted to the Trump White House about how he would oversee CBS News. Forget, also, the rumors that Skydance has talked to MAGA-friendly media mogul Bari Weiss about joining CBS News in a key role or about acquiring her outlet, the Free Press. For that matter, put a pin in the hand-wringing that greeted Skydance’s promise to the FCC that it will appoint an internal ombudsman who will evaluate complaints about CBS, including (but not limited to) allegations of bias at CBS News. Even if none of these issues were in the background right now, folks at CBS News would have legitimate reasons to be concerned about what will happen to the storied division under its new corporate owners.

Yes, Cheeks will still oversee CBS News, and up until now he has continued to invest in the division and largely allowed it to operate with the same independence it’s always had. But it’s not a stretch to think the same financial realities and cost-cutting mandates from Skydance that prompted Cheeks to cut bait on late night might also result in pretty dramatic changes at news — and would have even if Kamala Harris had been elected president. It’s not that network news is a money pit (like late night has become). Per the L.A. Times, ad spending on the three network newscasts was actually up 12 percent last year; morning news shows also tend to be revenue-generating machines. The problem is that CBS is deep in third place in both the evening and morning news races, despite a series of anchor shakeups and format changes over the years. And unlike the last big ownership change at CBS, when Westinghouse bought the network 30 years ago, this time the acquiring company does not have a rich history of and nostalgia for making and distributing TV news programming. Put both of these facts together, and it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a streaming-centric company like New Paramount at some point decides that nightly morning and evening newscasts, and the still-large teams needed to produce them, aren’t the most effective use of its resources.

To be clear, neither Cheeks nor Skydance execs have even hinted at such a change; file all of this under “thinking out loud.” What’s more, there are plenty of other ways New Paramount could rethink its commitment to national news that wouldn’t involve completely getting out of the morning- and evening-news business. Instead of spending millions to make its own shows, it could farm out production to a third party — like CNN, which as part of the spun-off Discovery Global will be eager to find new revenue streams. (Rumors of a CBS News–CNN partnership have persisted for well over a decade, so this really wouldn’t be a huge shock.) Plus, regardless of what happens to CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings, other CBS News shows — specifically 60 Minutes, Sunday Morning, and 48 Hours — are far more successful, ratings-wise, and seem pretty likely to continue in their current forms. Ditto CBS’s local news operations, which provide the backbone for CBS’s free, 24/7 news streamer. Bottom line: There are good reasons for CBS to maintain a presence in the news business. The real question is whether the overlords at New Paramount think that footprint should look much different than it does today.

Will MTV get less Ridiculousness?

Current Paramount Global co-CEO Chris McCarthy has said he will be leaving the company when the merger closes next week, and while his exit raises several questions — for example, will talent like Yellowstone’s Sheridan follow him out the door at some point? — none is more important than what happens to Ridiculousness when he’s gone. McCarthy had several notable wins during his tenure at Par Global (and its predecessor Viacom), but for many MTV viewers, he’ll forever be known as the guy who, for better or worse, decided to turn over the bulk of the network’s daytime lineup to that one viral video show (which still cranks out dozens of new episodes every year, by the way.) He explained his decision to Vulture in 2023, arguing Ridiculousness was what the (older) audience still watching cable TV during the daytime hours wanted to watch and that it simply made sense to turn the iconic network into the basic-cable equivalent of a streaming FAST channel. We’ll be curious to see whether the new bosses at New Paramount agree.

Despite FCC boss Brendan Carr’s partisan bragging on cable news, if you look at what Skydance committed to on paper, it’s quite possible — though, of course, not guaranteed — that this “ombudsman” will be no different than the ombudsmen both GE and Comcast pledged to establish as part of their FCC approval processes.