Over the weekend, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance officially announced that their $111 billion megamerger is a go, and Paramount CEO David Ellison spoke about the deal for the first time during an investor call on Monday.
It was generally assumed that the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services would be combined (Paramax?), which Ellison has now confirmed.
“As we said, we do plan to put the two services together, which today gives us a little over 200 million direct to consumer subscribers,” Ellison said (via THR). “We think that really positions us to compete with the leaders in the space. At Paramount, by the middle of this year, we’ll have completed the consolidation of our three services under one unified stack, and you can see us taking a similar approach to this platform going forward. And we think the combined offering, and given the amount of content and what we can do from the tech side, really will put us in a position to be able to compete with the most scaled players in DTC.”
The main HBO brand will continue to “operate with independence,” however.
“Casey[Bloys] and his team do absolutely a remarkable job at HBO,” Ellison continued. “And as we said, we do plan for that to be able to operate with independence, so that HBO can, candidly, do what it does incredibly well. Our viewpoint is HBO should stay HBO. They built a phenomenal brand. They are a leader in the space, and we just want them to continue doing more of it. But by bringing the platforms together, all of our content will be able to reach even a broader audience than we can do standalone.”
One major concern when Netflix looked likely to win the WBD bidding war was reduced theatrical windows, but Ellison has reaffirmed his commitment to releasing 15 films from each studio every year, with full 45-day windows before going to premium video on-demand, with longer windows for hit films.
“Franchises and big pieces of intellectual property are launched in theaters, period,” Ellison assured. “We really believe that movies should be seen in theaters, and we still believe it’s what that’s one of the most significant places that you can really create long term resident intellectual property. Television is a completely different business in that regard. You can obviously pierce the zeitgeist, and put huge hits up on the direct-to-consumer platforms. But when it comes to the DTC business, engagement is absolutely key to obviously, success there. So you have to look at what drives engagement.”
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