NEW YORK (AP) — Tony Soprano, meet Vito Corleone.
In a marriage of two massive Hollywood portfolios, Paramount’s $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery closed Tuesday, uniting everything from cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny and SpongeBob Squarepants to news delivered by Anderson Cooper and Gayle King.
The resulting company, a behemoth now known as Skydance, reshapes the media world. Here’s what the deal may mean for streaming, movies, news and more:
Skydance brings Paramount+ together with HBO Max with plans to unify its streaming products “into a single service over time.” What this would be called and how it might affect consumer costs and choices remains unknown. David Ellison, the architect of the deal and the company’s CEO, has suggested HBO could still have some level of independence.
“Our viewpoint is, HBO should stay HBO,” Ellison said earlier this year. “They built a phenomenal brand, they are a leader in this 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.”
Paramount also has acquired Warner’s smaller Discovery+ streamer, joining Paramount+, Pluto TV and BET+.
Critics have expressed skepticism about how consumers might benefit, warning that already rising subscription fees could spike as the conglomerate meets payments on the billions of dollars in debt Ellison took on to finance the deal.
What’s not in dispute is the size of the resulting library of content. Paramount+ and HBO Max alone add up to roughly 14% of the U.S. streaming market, comparable to rival Disney+, but still behind Amazon Prime at 17% and Netflix at 19%, according to the streaming guide JustWatch. It pairs movie franchises like “Mission: Impossible” with “Lord of the Rings,” television hits from “I Love Lucy” to “Friends,” and personalities ranging from Guy Fieri to RuPaul.
Don’t expect a “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives Drag Race” anytime soon, but with so many properties combining forces, there is potential for all kinds of crossover.
Paramount and Warner Bros. are two of Hollywood’s oldest studios. Their merger means fewer companies control legacy film production.
Under a settlement reached last month with 12 states, the combined company has agreed to distribute 30 films in theaters each year for the next two years — and 32 films each year for three years after that. The fine print notes that only 50% of those movies would have to be “produced or jointly produced” by the combined company. Skydance also agreed to increase spending on film production in the U.S. by at least $1.5 billion over the next five years.
Still, many have expressed worry about what further consolidation could mean for jobs and which projects are greenlit down the road. Regulatory filings have indicated that the new ownership will be looking for ways to cut costs — including layoffs and downsizing some overlapping operations.
Hollywood’s big six shrank to five when Disney bought most of 20th Century Fox in a deal finalized in 2019. Now it's a big four: Skydance, Disney, Universal and Sony.
The deal also puts news giants CNN and CBS under the same ownership, a concern among many journalists given the Ellison family's close relationship with President Donald Trump.
CBS News has taken steps to appeal to more conservative viewers since Ellison installed Free Press founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. At “60 Minutes,” the new management brought heaps of turmoil, with the firings of its executive producer and three veteran correspondents, who have claimed that Weiss sought changes to news reports that appeared to be driven by politics.
Trump, who has attacked the reporting of both networks as “fake news,” said Tuesday that he's happy the merger closed, and that Skydance is “going to be a great company.”
Foreign investors poised to hold sizable indirect ownership stakes are also in the spotlight. The FCC cleared Paramount’s request for sovereign funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to indirectly own nearly 50% of the combined company’s equity interests, and potentially up to 100% through future investments, but no voting rights.
Ellison has said editorial independence will be maintained at CNN. The combined company is retaining Mark Thompson as CNN’s editor-in-chief, and has agreed to form a “News Editorial Independence Board.”
Skydance’s corporate board of directors will choose who sits on this new body.
Grantham-Philips reported from Chicago.
The Warner Bros. water tower is seen at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
CEO of Paramount Skydance David Ellison, right, and wife Sandra Lynn Modic walk to the White House to attend a state dinner hosted for China's President Xi Jinping, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
A Skydance billboard is displayed outside Paramount Global office in Times Square, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A wealthy couple in suburban Los Angeles recruited women across the country to serve as surrogates, promising them that they were just looking for another child to grow their family.
Instead, prosecutors say, the couple used several surrogates at the same time, amassed a brood of 21 children — some as young as 2 months — and raised them in a “house of horrors” where they suffered daily beatings at the hands of cruel nannies as the couple watched and laughed from a network of surveillance cameras.
Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, were arrested Tuesday at their home in Arcadia, a city about 13 miles (20 kilometers) northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
The couple face several counts of child abuse as well as conspiracy to commit child abuse, accessory after the fact and dissuading a witness, according to Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman.
“This case is unprecedented. It is horrific,” he said during a morning news conference. “The physical abuse, beating and punishment that these very young children received is despicable.”
Prosecutors were seeking $100 million bail for the couple because of the serious nature of the charges and because they are flight risks, Hochman said. They were scheduled to be arraigned at the Pasadena courthouse later in the day.
Fifteen children were removed from the opulent home last year after an allegation of abuse, and another six living elsewhere were also located. They ranged in age from 2 months to 13 years, with most between 1 and 3. Police believe Zhang gave birth to one or two of the children, while the rest were carried and delivered by surrogates.
Hochman said the couple set up an agency, Mark Surrogacy, that they operated from home and used to hire surrogates throughout the U.S. But prosecutors said the couple misled the women, telling some that they could not conceive and others that they only had one child and wanted one more to complete their family.
“The house could only be described as a house of horrors for these incredible young children,” Hochman said.
Zhang and Xuan were first arrested in May 2025 after a hospital reported that their 2-month-old infant had a traumatic head injury, the result of being violently shaken by a nanny, according to Arcadia police.
Police did not file charges at the time, saying they needed to complete the investigation.
Hochman said the couple set up three rooms they called learning centers, where the children spent several hours a day sitting at desks under the supervision of nannies.
Through an extensive surveillance system including motion-activated cameras, the couple watched as the nannies physically abused the children, including daily beatings, he said.
In one video, Xuan is shown entering a room and telling a nanny to strike a child harder, Hochman said, and in another he joins the nanny in hitting the child.
The nannies were allegedly told “not to leave any physical marks on the children,” and when police arrived to investigate in May 2025, the children were told to deny they had been beaten.
After examining the surveillance video, police issued an arrest warrant for Chunmei Li, the nanny seen hurting the 2-month-old infant, but she could not be found.
Hochman said “there will be a reckoning” for the defendants, one of whom faces more than 17 years in prison if convicted.
When asked about the couple’s motivation, Hochman said that was part of the investigation, as was the parentage of each child.
Mitchell Krems, Xuan’s attorney, previously told ABC7 that Xuan’s goal was to raise children who become productive adults.
“The reason he has all these children is because he wants them to contribute to society. He is not a man who is self-indulgent,” Krems said. “Some who are wealthy might spend on jewelry or cars, but he is actually spending his resources to help his children become educated so that they can be the philosophers, the physicians, the researchers and the inventors that help society.”
Krems did not immediately respond Tuesday to an email seeking comment.
Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman agrees to carry and deliver a child for another person or couple, often after an embryo transfer.
There is no comprehensive federal law regulating surrogacy, leaving most rules to the states.
California is considered to be surrogacy-friendly because it has clear laws governing the process. Both sides are required to have lawyers, and there must be a written, notarized contract before an embryo transfer takes place.
Investigators have said they were looking into whether the couple misled surrogates around the country and at least eight women came forward to say they were aggressively pursued to serve as surrogates.
The women, many of them first-time surrogates, said they were given misleading or incomplete information about the couple’s family situation and intentions.
At least one, Kayla Elliott, is now trying to get custody of a baby she birthed for the couple.
Marcelo reported from New York.
FILE - An aerial view shows the home of Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan on July 16, 2025, in Arcadia, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
