What will Paramount-Warner Bros. be called?

The studio merger logic of “bigger is better” dates back to Hollywood almost as long as the industry has existed. The same goes for such consolidation. In 1933, for example, the Marx Brothers comedy troupe revealed the name of its production company, with a characteristic wink, as International Amalgamated Consolidated Affiliated World Wide Film Productions Company Incorporated, of North Dakota.

This name makes it sound like saying “Paramount Skydance Warner Bros.” out loud. Discovery” is almost a breeze once the final ink is dry on David Ellison’s $111 billion merger. But, in this day and age, even five words — a mash-up of two century-old studio names on either side of a new media company, with a cable channel tacked on at the end — seems like too much.

That’s the dilemma facing the Ellison team: What do you call a company that seems to have swept away half of Hollywood? Until now, it was known as WarnerMount, which tellingly leads with the acquired studio, or ParaBros, which is more of a nod to the optics of the buyers’ C-suite mix. But the official name has not yet been revealed and Paramount remains silent, refusing any comment on the subject.

But the name is not nothing. The decision will signal to both the industry and the Wall Street crowd the priorities of its new owner. On a large scale, you could say it sets the strategic direction. Does Ellison want to look to the future rather than the past, given all his talk about confronting tech giants in the attention economy? Or does his love for the entertainment industry and big-budget cinema evoke a nostalgic side?

And now, with a consent decree on the rules of the road to follow thanks to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, he also has to keep this team’s optics in mind (you can’t look like a monopoly right after doing a deal where critics’ main complaint is that the merger vaporizes another buyer from the landscape). And the title will also indicate how Ellison’s ego plays a role in the process as well.

You have to think about tradition. The name and font of Paramount Pictures evoke the best Oscar-winning films like The godfather Or Forrest Gump Or Top Gun. That’s why, after Shari Redstone merged her father Sumner’s Viacom and CBS empires, she rebranded the robot and awkwardly named ViacomCBS as Paramount Global, while also christening its flagship streamer Paramount+ (and dropping that name CBS All Access). The name Paramount, Redstone believed, symbolized quality and classic Hollywood, and was a product known around the world.

The same could be said of Warner Bros., home of Casablanca And Rebel without a cause and countless other classics (many of which we associate with Warners but are actually MGM features, like Wizard of Oz(thanks to Warners purchasing much of this library and releasing these films in rotation on the Turner Classic Movies channel). This is why the Warner name has stuck despite countless mergers and acquisitions. It resisted a merger with then-publishing giant Time Inc and suffered the indignity of being taken over by AOL in what is now considered the most disastrous media mega-deal of all time. In what probably should have been a tell-all, when AT&T acquired it in 2018, the telecommunications company swallowed Time Warner entirely and there was no trace of the Warner name.

Considered unimportant to AT&T a few years later, it was sold to David Zaslav’s cable giant, who – no doubt a nod to his ego – ensured that Discovery was represented in the Warner Bros. merger. Discovery. This framing gave the impression that Warner Bros. and Discovery were equal, when in reality the assets sought (like the movie studio and HBO) were mostly on the WB’s side. Zaslav’s team attempted to draw inspiration from this quality from Hollywood’s golden age by revealing a truly hideous logo in 2021 alongside a quote from The Maltese Falcon (“The stuff dreams are made of”).

A clue as to how Ellison might plan to proceed with the naming is what he did when his much smaller Skydance Media (founded in 2006) merged with Paramount (founded in 1912). Remember that when Skydance first signed a deal in 2024, almost a year before it closed Paramount, it initially redesigned the Paramount logo to look like Skydance’s. As if this Skydance DNA would be what energizes Paramount’s next chapter.

This change ultimately did not happen once the deal was concluded: why mess with a font synonymous with Hollywood? The Paramount Script has been around almost as long as the company has existed. It was reproduced in theaters far from Los Angeles and was the first thing audiences saw on countless titles in theaters (the Indiana Jones films come to mind in that every first scene finds a way to take place on Paramount Mountain). There is an authenticity test here. This Paramount-ified Skydance logo looks just a little disabledespecially for a studio that has been around for around 100 years. Here is the Paramount Pictures logo adorning the front door of the Hollywood studio in 1920:

Although officially the company is now called Paramount Skydance (i.e. billed as a marriage of equals even though it really isn’t), you only need to take a look at the water tower on the lot to see how Ellison actually plays it. The tower bears the iconic Paramount mountain, stars and font with just a small disclaimer underneath reading “A Skydance Corporation.” Should we expect this soon for Warner Bros. Water Tower as well? in Burbank? Seems like a decent bet.

In that case, when the deal officially closes, likely in early October, will Ellison finally unveil Skydance Corporation as the new name for his entire holding company that is home to dozens of cable channels as well as two movie studios and two major news brands? HBO, a Skydance company. CNN, a Skydance company. Paramount was already there, too, when it was purchased by the manufacturing conglomerate Gulf and Western Industries in 1966 and was branded “A Gulf + Western Company” under its logo. There is a certain organizational logic in favor of synergy when tagging a vast empire of assets.

This poses some problems. First, Skydance is the least iconic of all the names Ellison has collected so far. Yes, it’s his own company that he started and built himself (well, started and built with financial help from his father, Oracle mogul Larry Ellison, who is worth about $200 billion). But, visually, nothing says “I bought and ingested iconic studios and now they’re just tiles on a screen in my holding company” like erasing studio names from the parent company’s business card.

Second, this new company is not AT&T, which ultimately cared much more about the telecommunications side and effectively dumped Warner because it wasn’t a core part of its business. Movies and TV shows are the name of the game for this merged company. So you would guess that you should do your best by leading with the most recognizable blue-chip names.

Think back to all the embarrassing and embarrassing setbacks during the AT&T and Warner Bros. years. Discovery to find out if the flagship streamer should be called Max or HBO Max. (It started as HBO Max before changing to Max, then reverting to its original name HBO Max.) Ultimately, the C-suite led with the name that signaled quality to as many consumers as possible (even though executives privately worried about diluting HBO’s good reputation with a streaming service offering thousands of shows of varying quality).

In this case, if Ellison does indeed name his holding company Skydance Corporation, that might be the best of all options, even if it doesn’t tip its hat to any particular studio other than the one he created himself. Currently, the company is listed on Nasdaq under the name PSKY, but it is expected to move to the New York Stock Exchange in early October. (It should be noted that the SKY symbol is already taken up on the NYSE by a modular home manufacturing company.)

If including Skydance Corporation in the main part of the name is indeed the plan, perhaps reach out to the Marx Bros. After all, an “Amalgamated Consolidated Affiliated…” approach with studio names would have been the best solution to preserve a piece of Hollywood history.