Skydance plans to bundle HBO Max and Paramount+ next year

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — Skydance will start selling HBO Max and Paramount+ together in a streaming bundle early next year, the company said Monday.

It’s part of an industrywide trend toward bundling — and a prelude to further integration between the two streaming services.

“Long-term, the plan is basically to bring them together,” Skydance CEO David Ellison said last month when the media mega-merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery took effect.

On Monday, the newly enlarged company reported quarterly earnings for the first time and sketched out its plan for billions of dollars in cost savings.

Ellison promised to find at least $6 billion in “synergies” after combining Paramount with the much larger Warner.

“By combining two global streaming services, two film and TV studio groups, two television portfolios, and overlapping corporate functions, we can reduce duplicative spend across an expense base of more than $50 billion,” the company said in a shareholder letter on Monday.

Savings will come through layoffs, “reducing management layers,” consolidating real estate, streamlining the use of third-party vendors and relying more heavily on AI tools, among other areas.

Ellison has already set up a leadership structure that unifies many of the far-flung Paramount and Warner brands under single leaders.

And the changes are continuing. Skydance also announced Monday that James Gunn and Peter Safran would step down as co-chairmen of DC Studios and “return full time to their creative work.”

Jeremy Latcham, a former Marvel executive, will replace them next month as head of the studio overseeing blockbuster franchises including Superman and Batman.

Through the merger, every movie, TV episode and other piece of content “can work harder for us,” Monday’s shareholder letter stated, suggesting the titles can be distributed and monetized in new ways.

A combined HBO Max-Paramount+ platform is critical to that. One of the first steps is to sell them together at a discounted price, though Skydance did not share pricing details on Monday.

“Skydance’s plans to bundle Paramount+ and HBO Max is a temporary setup to get viewers accustomed with both offerings before they combine into a single entity,” Emarketer senior analyst Ross Benes said.

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