Ellison’s reign
After the dramatic ending of the merger drama between Netflix, Warner Bros. and Paramount, Paramount Skydance would walk away with the Warner Bros. property and the merger is underway. Yesterday, David Ellison would already announce plans to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into one streaming platform, “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. 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.”
15 Warner Bros Movies in Theaters
Adding on to the streaming announcement, Ellison would also commit to releasing films in theaters for a 45-day window. According to Variety, Ellison has also vowed to release 15 films into theaters from Warner Bros., along with 15 films from Paramount each year. He would explain,
As we have said consistently, we are committed to delivering a broad pipeline of high-quality storytelling, including 15 theatrical films per year per studio, for a total of at least 30 films annually. We really believe that movies should be seen in theaters.”
Ellison would claim that Paramount has “already demonstrated our ability to increase output” as Paramount will be releasing 15 films into theaters this year, which would increase from the eight films put out in 2025. Warner Bros. would release 11 movies into theaters last year, so Ellison aims to raise the studio’s output. However, he did give credit to Warners for having “a powerhouse slate,” as he credited such box office hits as Superman and Minecraft with “propelling” the company to $4 billion in box office revenue.
Theatrical space
On the Monday conference call, Ellison would explain, “When you look at the theatrical space, which is something we deeply, deeply believe in, large franchises and big pieces of intellectual property are launched in theaters, period. I personally learned this lesson in 2022. We basically had the largest theatrical box office film with Top Gun: Maverick, which became a cultural phenomenon, grossing $1.5 billion.” He adds, “At the same time, we released The Adam Project that summer on Netflix, which, at the time of its release, was the most successful film in Netflix… [it] previewed incredibly well with audiences but did have a different cultural resonance.”
Ellison stated, “We said from Day 1 when we acquired Paramount that we weren’t going to be in the business of making movies directly for streaming.”
