Gilroy: Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Will 'Destroy' Hollywood — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Tony Gilroy slammed the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger at the "Behemoth!" premiere at Alice Tully Hall, telling Variety: "to destroy the architecture that made [the business] so in the name of venture capital, it's tragic."
- Skydance's David Ellison announced the deal would place both historic studios under a company named Skydance, with a tentative close date of Tuesday, Oct. 6.
- The merger would consolidate Hollywood's traditional Big Five studios — Disney, Universal, Sony, Warner Bros. and Paramount — under just four corporate owners, per the source.
- Sanne Wohlenberg, the film's producer, said consolidation would make "the possibilities for a filmmaker alarmingly limited," adding: "we are steering into one [bad time]… we will survive it and I hope for better times."
- "Behemoth!", a $36 million mid-budget drama starring Pedro Pascal as a cellist re-entering Hollywood film scoring, was selected as the centerpiece of the 64th New York Film Festival, following James Gray's "Paper Tiger" and preceding Ava DuVernay's "14th."
- Gilroy thanked Matt Greenfield and Searchlight Pictures (the Disney-owned indie studio that also produced his "Andor") for greenlighting a film he called "not an easy movie to greenlight, and not an easy movie to sell."
- Ellison has publicly maintained Paramount and Warner Bros. will retain their separate studio identities under Skydance, though Gilroy and Wohlenberg both expressed skepticism at the premiere.
Why it matters: If Skydance closes the deal on the tentative Oct. 6 date, Hollywood's Big Five shrinks to four corporate owners — and mid-budget adult dramas like Gilroy's $36 million "Behemoth!" become harder to greenlight, according to both Gilroy and producer Wohlenberg. Ellison's promise to keep the two studios' identities separate is being met with public skepticism from filmmakers whose careers were built inside that very mid-budget architecture.
Ask SkimNews
