The important info in the above video from Cord Cutters News is in the front. I’m not covering Roku or most of the other stuff, though I do plan to talk about the Darkwing Duck reboot tomorrow or next week, depending on events.
First let’s be clear about what this is, or at least how I’m seeing it. Correct me if I’m wrong. Paramount isn’t so much merging with Warner Brothers to become Warner Paramount or something. Skydance bought Paramount and now the final hurdles are out of the way. This is the only political comment I’m planning to make this article: When Rob Bonta dropped his lawsuit the other states went with him. Speaking as someone from Connecticut, the only reason our Attorney General got involved is that it’s an election year and his ads talk about how hard he fights. We had no business in there, and frankly none of the other states did, either. Not even California, who at least houses Hollywood. It wasn’t about CNN, outside of demanding an oversight board nobody asked Disney to put together when they bought ABC. Basically they wanted the guy whose father kind of knows the President they hate.
Hollywood lost their minds around the same time I lost part of my colon. Coincidence? Yeah, probably. Let’s get back to why I’m posting this: posting Spaceballs clips. I mean…what happens now?
Like when Discovery Networks bought Time Warner from AT&T to form Warner Brothers Discovery (guess we have a new logo to look forward to), I have some concerns going in that of course nobody in mainstream entertainment discussion is going to go over because all they care about are the shows and movies. I actually brought some of this up when the purchase was announced, and probably when Netflix tried to get it. It starts with a question I have never heard answered and I’m very curious about:
Hope the new logo’s going to be more exciting that this. It’s 2026 so I know it won’t…
Why did Skydance want ALL of Warner Brothers Discovery so bad?
Netflix finally admitted they were never going to maintain the theater deals because all they care about is streaming, between their business model and one of the guys in charge outright hating the theatrical experience. I don’t think this was a mission to save Warner Brothers in the movies or movie theaters. Discovery Networks isn’t part of that because nothing they produce, educational reality shows for families and cartoons for kids, falls into that outside of that one My Little Pony movie. Even then they just licensed the show after The Hub project with Hasbro ended. They could have left Discovery Networks’ family of channels, CNN, and whatever else wasn’t Warner Brothers or Turner’s entertainment arms like David Zaslav was already planning to spinoff and be done with it. Even then, some of the Discovery channels are going to be sold off.
David Ellison really wanted everything that came together in the various AOL ATT Turner Time Warner Discovery Did I Miss Anything hot potato over the years. And he wanted it BAD! Dude fought Netflix like his life depended on it, which considering he already bought Paramount is still bizarre. That’s a lot of debt already and now he has more thanks to foreign investment…which brings up concerns this website is not designed to explore. I got political enough in the intro paragraphs. I’m just wondering what drove him to want all of that as well! “Greed” sounds like an easy answer but “you have to spend money to make money” has its limits.
Spock likes to watch.
What happens to Star Trek And DC Studios?
Why put them both together? Because one suffered from a problem the other still has: bad leadership with a contract. Les Moonves wanted to hit Sheri Redstone for not keeping CBSViacom, where he had power, and Paramount, where he didn’t, separate. He also hated Star Trek. What better middle finger out the door could he have than getting someone who didn’t care about Star Trek locked in to making Star Trek?
Enter Alex Kurtzman, who was more interested in his story tastes, and later his politics (I said I’d TRY), than making good Star Trek. Under Secret Hideout, Kurtzman’s company after parting ways with JJ Abrams’s Bad Robot and their own bad Trek movies, Kurtzman basically ruined Star Trek for classic fans and didn’t bring enough of the mythical “modern audience” along. What we got was one-sided heavy handed preaching, wacky hijinks, and modern vernacular centuries after we would have been gone because as far back as Voyager everyone forgot Star Trek took place in an alternate timeline where World War III happened and was all about eugenics and biological augmentation. I’ll discuss Star Trek’s fall another time, but this does tie in to what’s going on with the current DC movieverse.
Zack Snyder’s DC was a depressing mess of superhero hatred, which isn’t surprising since his views on superheroes are closer to Alan Moore and Frank Miller than the traditional true blue heroic protectors. It also failed miserably, so Warner Brothers overcorrected by releasing a tonally confused Justice League re-edit and then shutting down the “Snyderverse” altogether, replacing him with James Gunn…who superovercorrected. Unlike Kurtzman he let the other folks do the political preach and pander boogie, but Gunn still brought a form of humor he mastered in the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies for Marvel Studios. What’s resulted is a Superman movie that felt insulting to Superman fans, a Supergirl movie based on a questionable story made worse, a Peacemaker series that’s been a joke, and a cartoon only remembered for G.I. Robot gleefully shooting Nazis if at all.
Kurtzman is out the door. Anything not finished isn’t getting another season, and that’s because Ellison isn’t burying season two of Starfleet Academy as a tax write-off like Zaslav did with Batgirl…though he probably should. Some people insist Gunn will fire himself because father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate, but those people are idiots. The only reason Gunn wouldn’t take advantage of a popular IP that he can use to trick people into watching his stuff or make over in his own image is that Skydance took too much control from him, the same control that shouldn’t have been taken away from Kevin Feige with Marvel, or they fire him and possibly co-conspirator Peter Safran and try to repair DC’s reputation. Speaking of DC…
“Do we have enough bathrooms?”
What becomes of DC Comics?
The eternal question when it comes to DC or Marvel having new owners: what happens to the comics? Nothing has said that Ellison cares any more about what the comics are doing than anyone else who has owned the company the past few passarounds. Will he get them on track finally, use them for IP farms for the “important” media like everyone else, or sell them off and just license the movies? I’m waiting for the same “they’re shutting the comics down” panic we’ve seen in past acquisitions, but I don’t know if they’ll go that far. The way comics have been done could use a makeover, which would take an article series to go over, which I have had in the back of my mind for awhile now, but they wouldn’t listen to me.
I also wonder what happens to Paramount’s licensed comics, like IDW Star Trek, or the Warner owned stuff not being produced by DC Comics, like the Dynamite offerings. Disney pulled their licenses away from Boom Studios and Dark Horse comics, allegedly to be used by Marvel, only to be licensed to other publishers who hasn’t done as good a job. Star Wars is the only comic Marvel’s putting out from Disney’s various absorptions, and they still license the kids comics to others. Why would a Disney company make anything for kids? DC isn’t and neither is Paramount, with little to nothing from Warner Brothers. Discovery Networks has Discovery Family, but I’m not expecting a Cake Boss comic anytime soon. DC’s kids output is rare and rarely uses superhero characters as superheroes, while their main comics are so kid-unfriendly I don’t know why they need Black Label or the Absolute universe. Odds of that changing? Very low, but they aren’t asking my opinion. Speaking of things they aren’t asking me about…
“That’s a lot of ketchup, Mr. Jack.’
What happens to all the cartoons and kids channels?
Paramount isn’t really known for a huge cartoon library, considering how much of their old cartoons ended up in public domain after the studio closed. Star Trek would be able to have a reunion with the Filmation DC cartoons but it doesn’t matter. Between Warner Brothers Animation, Ruby-Spears Productions, Hanna-Barbera, and Discovery Kids/Family, their animation library is already arguably the largest in the world. Now with what little Paramount still owns that wasn’t licensed distribution it’s even larger. David Zaslav’s only smart move was licensing it out to MeTV Toons and Tubi while putting out a mediocre Cartoon Rewind streaming channel on Amazon Prime. They took a lot off of HBO Max, too.
Ellison has a chance to fix this. After all, they have Cartoon Network, Pluto TV, and the Nickelodeon channels plus now TWO of the biggest streaming services out there. If they keep Warner Brothers Discovery’s various streaming channels (and Pluto TV does have channels that stream to other services while Paramount has their own deal with the MeTV channels, so it’s not like Paramount is afraid to license stuff outside of Pluto TV and Paramount Plus), there’s still a question of how to use all their newly obtained kids and family programming and I already gave that advice after Cord Cutters News kept insisting they’d have to sell off either Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon for concessions, which it turns out they didn’t. I don’t expect anyone at Skydance will read that, but they should. It’s the rare occasion when I think I had a brilliant idea outside of my wheelhouse.
For older cartoon watchers, what happens to new movies? I hope they have more in mind than finishing the Knightfall adaptation trilogy. As long as it isn’t more Aztec Batman movies or Amazon’s Caped Crusader, they’ll hopefully made better decisions. It depends on what Ellison thinks of animation. (Sidebar: more audio dramas would be nice, which I mention here because I have nowhere else to put it.)
It’s true: Superman 64 was Lex’s idea!
And what about the video games?
I could go over numerous properties but you have a life and I vaguely remember what that was like, so here’s one more. Star Trek Online might be doing the heavy lifting for the franchise, but Paramount and Skydance don’t have their own video game publisher that I’m aware of. Now they’re getting WB Games, which has produced some great video games for DC characters when they aren’t listening to Sweet Baby, Inc. They also have properties exclusive to the games, and that leads me to ask what WB Games’ future is? Nobody mentions video games. Do they keep licensing when they own a video game company? Does it make as much sense as licensing out comics, or more like licensing shows to other channels and services?
So those are the big questions I’ll be looking at. What are you concerned about? Wait, I have one more:
Are they going to block clips like they did with Ninja Turtles INTROS on YouTube? Just another way to screw me up!
