It’s telling that among the first casualties of David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. were Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, the studio executives known for spending freely on auteur-driven films like last year’s best-picture winner, .

The filmmaking career of Ellison, the son of Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, has largely focused on what the industry calls “popcorn” pictures: mass-market crowd pleasers like and two films he helped produce that together grossed more than $2 billion in theaters and were also hits with critics.

After Ellison took control of Paramount last year, he installed new management to broaden the film slate and introduce more fiscal discipline. The result was hits from well-known franchises like and that have put the Paramount film division on track for one of its most profitable years in the past decade and a half.

On Tuesday evening, at the century-old Paramount Pictures lot in Los Angeles, where films such as and were shot, Ellison described his vision as co-chief executive officer of the newly created Skydance Corp, following his $110 billion acquistion of rival Warner Bros.

“This combined company will be spending more on content and on storytelling than any other company in the world, more than Disney, more than Netflix,” Ellison said, addressing employees and journalists gathered in a soundstage. “That’s going to be really good for jobs.”In marrying two of Hollywood’s big five studios, Ellison gains a stable of franchises that include , , , , and .

The closest comparison in scale is Walt Disney Co.’s $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, which gave Disney access to franchises including , and that power moviegoing, demand for theme-park tickets and merchandise sales. But that deal resulted in fewer films coming from the combined studios, as Disney prioritized major releases.

Ellison said he wants to have a diverse slate of films, noting that his favorite movie last year was Warner Bros.’ , a genre-bending vampire thriller He and Skydance co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, who left Mattel Inc. to join the company, said they plan to divide their time between the two studio lots.

“The plan is to keep the studios independent creatively, so that each studio will have its own slate, its own relationships, its own opportunities,” Kreiz said.

In overseeing responsibility for the creative aspects of the business and relationships with talent, Ellison is expected to focus on valuable and beloved franchises from the two iconic Hollywood studios, favoring movies with stronger commercial prospects than the artier fare that’s defined Warner Bros. in recent years.

Ellison has assembled an executive team to turn his ambition into reality. He’s expanded the roles of Paramount Pictures heads Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, who as co-chairs of Skydance Motion Picture Group will oversee a slate of at least 30 releases a year in cinemas. The pair plan to build a calendar with titles that are varied enough to appeal to the widest possible number of moviegoers.

Their expanded remit and role at the new Skydance also highlights the fickle fates of the movie business. After being close to losing their jobs in early 2025, Abdy and De Luca were hailed for a string of hits later that year including , andleading Warner Bros. to its best box office performance in years. Their contracts were renewed.

But this year brought a string of fresh disappointments, including and which stars Tom Cruise as a theater actor playing an oil tycoon contending with an environmental catastrophe. Despite Cruise’s star power, the film opened in fifth place to just $8 million in its debut last weekend. Combined with other box office failures, including Warner Bros. studios is poised to lose hundreds of millions of dollars this year.

With nearly $87 billion in total debt and a commitment to find $6 billion in cost savings within three years, Ellison has little room for error at the box office.

Goldberg and Greenstein are making new movies in the proven intellectual property worlds of , , , , and .

They’re also exploring original ideas. Last fall they appointed Lia Buman as head of Paramount subsidiary Republic Pictures, which acquired the literary adaptation at the Cannes Film Festival, and signed production deals with director Jon M. Chu, filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg, and creators Matt and Ross Duffer.

In May, Paramount agreed to a pact with Warner Music Group Corp. that gives the studio rights to make movies based on the lives of the music company’s roster of artists such as Madonna, Frank Sinatra, Cher, Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie.

“They’re going to make 30 movies a year, growing to 32, and I don’t think they’re all going to be big blockbusters — I assume they’re going to pick the best projects from each studio, and they’re probably going to weed out and kill a few projects,” said Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at LightShed Partners. “The new management team probably gets its first big crack at changes at 2028, and there’s a lot of IP between these two companies to mine.”

Skydance is inheriting close to 40 movies in varying levels of development and production that were greenlit by De Luca and Abdy. The fate of those titles — which Warner Bros. printed on funereal-black t-shirts the studio distributed to cinema executives at an industry conference earlier this year after a sale to Paramount had been agreed — is up in the air.

The makeup of Skydance’s movie slate could change if Goldberg and Greenstein determine that the Warner Bros. films aren’t sufficiently commercial. Ellison often cites2022’s as an example of his tastes and ambition for the film studio.

Eric Schiffer, CEO of the Patriarch Organization, a private-equity firm based in Los Angeles that invests in media, said Ellison will likely look within the new Skydance’s vast library of content for ideas and take cues from competitors.

“I think they’ll reexamine a lot of their legacy IP to see what can be brought back and modernized,” he said. “It would not surprise me to see them also experiment with more creators. You’re seeing that done by Netflix where they’re pulling some of the YouTube stars.”In another indication of where Ellison sees safe bets, he has retained Peter Safran and James Gunn, the co-heads of the DC Studios comic-book hero label, whose hits include and Ellison, who views DC as a pillar in his movie strategy, has backed their vision and the two are currently spearheading a 10-year plan to revive the superhero label, Bloomberg has reported.

The pair are supervising DC’s release of on Oct. 23 after their last film, , failed to turn a profit in cinemas.

Earlier this year, Ellison traveled to Atlanta to the set of DC’s sequel, where studio heads gave a presentation to Paramount management including Chief Financial Officer Dennis Cinelli and Andy Gordon, who is now Skydance’s president, outlining the comic book studio’s strategy. There are other potential hits in the works.

As part of a distribution deal with and producer Legendary Entertainment that Goldberg and Greenstein signed last year, Paramount will also release , based on the video game of the same name, on Oct. 16. Ellison has made a priority of adapting youth-oriented video game properties, and Skydance is scheduled to release a live-action movie in June 2028.

Cruise is also on deck to star in a third film in the franchise, and to helm a sequel to the car racing film . In a presentation tied to the closing of the deal on Tuesday, Ellison noted that Paramount’s theatrical releases had nearly doubled under his leadership to 15 films this year from 8 in 2025.

Skydance’s film committment sets a high bar, and will be enforced by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who wrung out concessions as part of a settlement to an antitrust lawsuit brought by 12 states. Ellison has promised to release 30 films a year from the combined companies, keeping them in cinemas for at least 45 days.

“When we actually follow through on all those promises, I do believe it will rebuild trust,” Ellison said, while speaking at the lot.

Donna Langley, the chair of Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal Entertainment division, said it’s important film output doesn’t suffer as part of the merger, as it did after Disney acquired Fox.

“More young people are coming to the cinema, and we need to keep them there, so volume matters,” Langley, who runs the unit that includes the Universal Pictures film studio and Peacock streaming service, said at the annual Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on Oct 1.

That view reflects a wider anxiety in Hollywood about shrinking opportunities. Ellison has repeatedly insisted that the merger, which will create the largest theatrical distributor in the US by most estimates, will support the creative community by increasing the combined output of the Paramount and Warner Bros. studios. He also told employees in a town hall Tuesday that the appointment of Kreiz, who helped shepherd the hit move while he was CEO of Mattel, was based on his ability to take “extraordinary brands and IP” and build businesses around them for a global audience.

“We’re positioned to win in a way none of us have been before,” Ellison said in the town hall. “For the first time, we have the studios, the franchises, the libraries, the talent and the scale, all under one roof, to compete with anyone in the world.”