Skydance mashes proven properties of Paramount and Warner Bros. into an uncertain Hollywood hybrid

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Continuity will be the immediate emphasis for Skydance, the newly created entertainment behemoth borne of Paramount's $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery that closed on Tuesday.

For now, it will show off its bulging bundle of intellectual properties, with the official announcement touting “a franchise portfolio spanning Top Gun and Harry Potter to White Lotus and SpongeBob SquarePants.”

Several such lists could be made without any overlap. Tony Soprano is now under the same roof as Michael Corleone. The creations of J.R.R. Tolkien and Taylor Sheridan now share a home. And the DC Universe is in the same space as “Star Trek.”

Both companies also have a storied history — some of it even recent — of non-franchise creations, whose creators are worried about what will be left for them as big swaths of Hollywood fear for their jobs and productions.

Moviegoers and TV viewers may wonder what all the fuss was about in the short run, while in the long run they may not recognize the landscape that's left.

Here’s a look at how the consumption and production of film and television will look in the near future.

The streaming services that provide the most direct interface viewers have with the two merged companies — HBO Max for Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount+ for Paramount — will look the same Wednesday as they did Tuesday, but they won't stay that way.

In its announcement of the completed deal, echoing what CEO David Ellison previously told shareholders, Skydance said the two streamers “will unify into a single service over time.” No timeline was given.

The classic broadcast and cable properties the two companies own that feed those services — HBO, TNT, HGTV, and Food Network for Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS, MTV, BET and Nickelodeon for Paramount — should also show no short-term evidence of change, but that won't mean major upheaval isn't coming.

Combined, the two services have well over 200 million subscribers, though it’s not wholly clear how much overlap there is between the two. HBO Max’s share of that is nearly double that of Paramount+. That could have an effect on the branding of the chimera to come, and some of the HBO Max name — which Warner Bros. Discovery previously tried to drop in favor of just Max — could live on.

“I do not believe the consumer is going to observe the difference in the organization, whether it be in raised subscription fees to HBO Max or raised subscription fees to Paramount+ or new programming rolled out in the first quarter,” said J. Christopher Hamilton, a professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. “I think it’s going to take some time for them to really, really lock in on what implemented changes will have the least amount of disruption to the consumer base, but also to the town.”

The pipelines for each streamer have kept pumping as though no massive change was coming.

The biggest forthcoming piece of TV for Warner Bros. is its Harry Potter reboot, with a Christmas premiere for Season 1 on HBO Max and Season 2 shooting already underway for whatever its streamer is called when it drops.

Season 3 of “The Pitt,” which won best drama Emmys for each of its first two seasons, is well underway and set for an early 2027 release, and “The White Lotus” is set to finally complete its monthslong shooting of Season 4 on the French Riviera with a release sometime next year.

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” has wrapped shooting its second season and is slated to start rolling out episodes early in 2027, and the fourth and final season of its fellow “Game of Thrones” scion “House of the Dragon” is set to start shooting in the new year.

Paramount+'s slate is dominated by the many cowboy-coded creations of Sheridan, with new seasons forthcoming on “Landman,” “Tulsa King” and several of the spinoffs, prequels and sequels of his “Yellowstone.”

One major change is inevitable: Sheridan's contract runs out in 2028, when he'll be off to NBCUniversal.

In the past week, Paramount announced two franchises in development: a G.I. Joe movie with Bradley Cooper, directed by Danny McBride, and a live-action Transformers film, executive produced and creatively shaped by Steven Spielberg.

The Paramount slate has in the past dozen-plus years been heavily weighted toward franchise fare, whether it’s “Mission: Impossible,” “Star Trek,” “Sonic the Hedgehog,” or any of the other big-name brands in its arsenal.

While the studio had a slew of best picture winners in the 1990s, including “Forrest Gump,” “Braveheart” and “Titanic,” it’s been a bit of a drought since (broken only by 2007's “No Country for Old Men,” which Paramount distributed internationally).

Warner Bros., meanwhile, had been on a hot streak with a combination of original and franchise films. This year, under the stewardship of Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, they collected 30 Oscar nominations and won 11, including best picture for “One Battle After Another.”

Ellison wrote in a post on X last week that by combining the two storied studios, “we aren’t rewriting history — we’re equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine.”

But neither Abdy nor De Luca will be part of the merged operation, which left filmmakers like Tony Gilroy reeling. Gilroy called their exits “a seismic change in Hollywood of a magnitude that I don’t remember,” adding, “They’re just real film people. And these studios are real studios. There’s no reason for them to be merged or pulled apart.”

Paramount Motion Picture co-chairs Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg will lead the overall film operation for Skydance now. James Gunn and Peter Safran are expected to continue running DC Studios.

Skydance will also include Warner Bros.’ newest specialty label, Clockwork, with former NEON executive Christian Parkes remaining its head. The label was established to support independent projects, both produced in-house and acquired, with future releases including “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker’s latest, “Ti Amo!,” and Park Chan-wook’s Matthew McConaughey and Pedro Pascal movie “The Brigands of Rattlecreek.”

Theatrical exhibition lives or dies by a robust release schedule, and the promise of “a minimum of 30 high-quality theatrical films” a year will likely be an appealing one to exhibitors. Next year, the combined studios could exceed that with some 36 releases including a Superman sequel, a Minecraft movie sequel and “A Quiet Place Part III.”

Over the past two years, North American theater owners have reinvested some $2.7 billion in their cinemas, according to a report from the trade association Cinema United. The domestic box office is currently healthy, up around 19.5% from last year and is expected to cross the $8 billion mark this week.

The merged company has some big releases on the horizon for the remainder of this year too, including “Dune: Part Three.”

Cinema United’s president and CEO Michael O’Leary last month reiterated that their primary objective is to safeguard theaters from the “harms of legacy consolidation,” but the group was encouraged by the consent decree’s language on “increased film production for five years, meaningful theatrical exclusivity and wide distribution, prohibitions on cost increases, and continued access to the catalogs of Paramount and Warner Bros.” Those conditions, O’Leary said, will enable theaters “to adapt and succeed.”

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)

FILE - Vincent Pastore attends "The Sopranos" 25th anniversary celebration at Da Nico on Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP,File)

FILE - A visitor walks past portraits of DC Comics superheroes as she enters the "Action and Magic Made Here" interactive experience at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood media preview on June 24, 2021, in Burbank, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

A Skydance billboard is displayed outside Paramount Global office in Times Square, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

REIM, Israel (AP) — On a field where music festival revelers were gunned down by Hamas-led militants three years ago, Israelis on Wednesday embraced and wept for those lost in an attack that plunged the Middle East into war.

Israelis mourned at the site of the Nova Music Festival, as well as at bomb shelters, intersections and in communities targeted on Oct. 7, 2023. On that day — the deadliest in the country's history — militants killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostage. Israel's retaliatory offensive killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroyed much of Gaza and drove most of its 2 million residents from their homes.

This is the first anniversary since all the hostages, living and dead, were returned. Signs calling for their return are mostly gone, but reminders of those who were killed are ubiquitous in a country still reckoning with the trauma of that day.

For Palestinians, the anniversary brings another day of fear and misery. Most Gaza residents live in squalid tent camps, with large parts of cities bombed to rubble. More than half the territory remains in the hands of the Israeli military. Despite a ceasefire deal reached nearly a year ago, Israeli strikes continue almost daily.

Israeli troops occupy a large chunk of southern Lebanon in their conflict with Hezbollah militants, who began firing on Israel in 2023 in support of Hamas. Iran, the United States and their allies are locked in a confrontation that has seen attacks across the region and has shaken the global economy — a conflict that Israel helped launch and that the war in Gaza paved the way for, even if they weren’t directly connected.

Hundreds of people paid their respects to the more than 350 people killed in and around the festival site. Videos from that day showed militants gunning down fleeing revelers, shooting the wounded at point-blank range and ambushing those seeking refuge in bomb shelters.

On Wednesday, survivors' relatives hugged at 6:29 a.m. — the exact time the first rockets were launched three years ago — as explosions boomed in nearby Gaza.

Anya Davitashili, who lost her 25-year-old son, Sean, said she visits the site every Saturday. It’s where she feels closest to him.

“I have a video of him dancing here that ends at 6:29 in the morning. It’s in front of my eyes all the time,” she said. “Every morning, you wake up and there is just endless missing.”

Elkana Bohbot, 37, is marking the anniversary in Israel for the first time since his release after 738 days of captivity. For most of that time, he said, he was held underground in a dark, damp tunnel.

Bohbot, who was abducted from the festival, was kept in a small cell with other hostages, given little food and allowed to bathe only every few weeks, he said. His captors forced him to take part in propaganda videos, including one where he acted out a fake call to his family.

In the year since his release, Bohbot has undergone physical and emotional rehabilitation. In August, his wife, Rivka, gave birth to a daughter, fulfilling his promise to himself in the tunnels to give his 5-year-old son, Reem, a sibling.

The newborn Michele is “not a symbol for my people, she is more of a symbol for the enemy,” Bohbot told The Associated Press. “This child is the message for you that we were here and we will always be here forever.”

No events are expected Wednesday in Gaza, but Hamas in a statement defended the Oct. 7 attack, saying it had returned the Palestinian cause to the world’s attention.

“The conflict with the enemy did not begin on that day, (and) its final chapters are not written yet,” it said.

Palestinians in the territory said their suffering over the past three years had previously been unimaginable.

“We witnessed death, destruction, and bombardment that we had never known before,” said Walid Akram, a Gaza City resident who, like most in Gaza, has been displaced by the war.

Raed Khozeiq’s coastal neighborhood in Tel al-Hawa was largely flattened. Nothing about his life now is the same, he said.

“No country in the world has gone through what we have experienced here,” he said. “A war of extermination, starvation, the absence of schools and universities — nothing remains.”

More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory's Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its figures but says around half were women and children. The numbers from the ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts.

While a ceasefire that took effect Oct. 10, 2025, halted the heaviest fighting, Israeli strikes have continued, targeting what Israel says are Hamas militants. Since the ceasefire, 1,460 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the ministry. Five Israeli soldiers have been killed in attacks in that period. Restrictions on the entry of goods and aid have contributed to a hunger crisis, food security experts say.

A contentious election at the end of the month hangs over this year's anniversary in Israel. Voters are bitterly divided over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership, his role in the security failures surrounding the attack and his refusal to launch an official inquiry into them.

The attack set in motion a cascade of events that led to wars across the Middle East as Israel confronted Hamas, Hezbollah and their backer, Iran. Israel has seized swaths of territory in Syria and Lebanon, where more than 300,000 Lebanese remain displaced. The United States joined Israel in attacking Iran’s military and nuclear program in two rounds, battering Iran and upending global markets far from the battlefield.

Violence has also risen across the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israel’s far-right government has heightened restrictions on Palestinians while emboldening extremist settlers who have attacked them and destroyed their property.

Associated Press journalists Wafaa Shurafa in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, and Sam Metz in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

People carrying Israeli flags walk through an installation marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, on the beachfront in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

People walk past an installation marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, on the beachfront in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Israeli soldiers attend a memorial service marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas cross-border attack on Israel, near Kibbutz Nahal Oz, southern Israel, where female observer soldiers were killed, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Murid Akhziq, 43, lights a fire for cooking inside his home, which was destroyed during the Israel-Hamas war, in Gaza City, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Raz Zarfati, sister of Ron Zarfati who was killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, attend a memorial marking the third anniversary of the attack at the Nova music festival site near Kibbutz Reim, southern Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

Palestinians inspect the site of an early morning Israeli airstrike in Gaza city, Saturday, Oct. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

Palestinians inspect the site of an early morning Israeli airstrike in Gaza city, Saturday, Oct. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

Released hostage Elkana Bohbot poses in Kadima Zoran, Israel, Sunday, Sept. 27, 2026, before marking the Oct. 7 anniversary in Israel for the first time following his release from 738 days in captivity in the Gaza Strip. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

People attend a memorial service marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas cross-border attack on Israel, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, southern Israel, where many community members were killed and abducted, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Raz Zarfati, sister of Ron Zarfati who was killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, attend a memorial marking the third anniversary of the attack at the Nova music festival site near Kibbutz Reim, southern Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)