What Is Skydance And How Could It Acquire Paramount?

When David Ellison was 14 years old, a book appeared about his dad, the founder and CEO of tech giant Oracle. The biography’s title was as controversial as the subject: The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.

A few years later, in 2010, David Ellison, then 27, became the founder and CEO of Skydance Productions.

Early in its existence Skydance and Paramount Pictures entered into a cofinancing, production and distribution agreement, a relationship, renewed several times, that evidently has worked out well for both parties because on April 3, 2024, Skydance and Paramount Global, the firm that encompasses all the properties with the Paramount moniker, entered into a 30-day period of exclusive negotiations.

The likely outcome is that Skydance will buy Paramount–a company that started in 1912 and released films including Sunset Boulevard, The Godfather, and Titanic—for an estimated five billion dollars.

Clearly in the Elison clan it is a case of “de pere en fils.”

So what does Skydance—which changed its name from “Productions” to “Media” in 2016—do?

The simple answer to that is that it produces films (among other things) that make money.

Lot’s of money.

Right out of the box, in 2010, the first movie with “Skydance” in the title was the Coen Brothers’s remake of True Grit—which is the highest grossing film in the sibling’s oeuvre (>$252 million).

The following year Skydance entered into a series that has done exceedingly well: co-production of the Mission: Impossible movies starting with the fourth, Ghost Protocol, and continuing to the most-recent Dead Reckoning Part One (and presumably the follow-up, which reportedly won’t be called “Part Two”).

The affiliation with Tom Cruise led to the Jack Reacher movie of 2012, and the subsequent Jack Reacher: Never Go Back  of 2016. And in 2020 there was the Skydance-Cruise Top Gun: Maverick.

And in keeping with its series focus, in 2013 it produced Star Trek: Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond 2017. There was Terminator Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate.

While some of these movies might bring games to mind, that is not at all pushing the company’s boundaries, as Skydance Interactive, a game development company, started 2016. They added Skydance Animation in 2017.

Preceding them was Skydance Television, organized in 2013. It produced the  Amazon Reacher series, as well as the Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan that appears on the streamer. Skydance has tremendous opportunities in both of those franchise as there are 28 Reacher novels and a short story collection to boot, and 28 novels in the Jack Ryan universe ten by Clancy.

In addition, Skydance also has New Media (2019) and Sports (2021) divisions.

All of which is to say that it almost seems as though Skydance acquiring Paramount Global (consisting of, in part, Paramount Pictures, CBS Entertainment, Paramount+, MTV, Showtime) wouldn’t be in the least bit surprising. The company has the track record, and the deep pockets.