End Of An Era: Skydance Finalizes Merger, Bringing Warner Bros. And Paramount Under One Roof

For more than a century, Warner Bros. and Paramount existed as separate Hollywood institutions. Today, that distinction belongs to history.

With Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery now complete, two companies with animation legacies stretching back to the earliest decades of the American cartoon industry are, for the first time, part of the same corporate family, their identities as independent Hollywood powers largely swallowed up in the process.

It’s difficult to overstate just how much animation history has accumulated between them.

Paramount’s name appeared on cartoons from Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios, putting Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman, and Casper on movie screens generations before Rugrats, SpongeBob SquarePants, Airbender, and the rest of Nickelodeon became pillars of the company’s animation business.

Warner Bros., meanwhile, gave the world Looney Tunes and eventually became home to Hanna-Barbera, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, and one of the largest animation libraries in existence.

For decades, the two companies competed for audiences, talent, TV viewers, box office spots and revenue, and occasionally the same pieces of intellectual property.

Now they share an owner and a name.

The newly enlarged Skydance contains Warner Bros. Animation, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Nickelodeon, Paramount Animation, and Skydance Animation. It’s an extraordinary amount of American animation history gathered beneath a single corporate roof, straining under an 11-figure debt load.

Skydance, naturally, is looking forward, not backward. The company says its new operation will be a “single creative powerhouse,” producing at least 30 theatrical films and more than 180 television shows and series annually.

So there will still be Warner Bros.-labeled cartoons. There will still be Paramount-labeled cartoons. There will almost surely still be new adventures for Bugs Bunny and SpongeBob.

But after spending most of the past century on opposite sides of Hollywood, the cartoon icons now answer to the same boss.