What would have been one of the biggest Hollywood mergers in recent memory is now likely dead.
Paramount and Skydance Media, which had been in talks for a mega-merger for several months, have officially called off negotiations. The collapsed merger calls into question the future of legacy movie studios.
Jonathan Taplin is a veteran TV and movie producer and a former vice president of media mergers and acquisitions at Merrill Lynch. He tells KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman that Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, was “trying to sell the last deck chairs on the Titanic.”
“Paramount is an outlier in the sense of it’s pushed together a bunch of companies by Sumner Redstone, Shari’s father,” he said. “It has not been successful. It loses a lot of money. It has a lot of brands that don't have any meaning anymore like MTV.”
Taplin said the dissolution of the deal for Paramount probably won’t change much as far as audiences are concerned.
“Paramount Plus will kind of limp along. Paramount Pictures will still make a few pictures. The cable networks that were once called Viacom will slowly dissolve into nothingness,” he said.
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While legacy studios have had trouble competing with Netflix in the world of streaming, Taplin noted that Disney and Warner Brothers are still doing fine – but they are “fairly debt-loaded.” He cautioned that ”the movie business writ large is not a great business right now.”
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