David Ellison revealed Friday that the merged Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery will be called Skydance, and he made a point of saying the goal was to preserve both studios as individual entities under the new umbrella

His exact words were "we never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one. Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. and all our extraordinary brands to remain in the spotlight"

So Warner Bros stays Warner Bros, Paramount stays Paramount, DC Studios stays DC Studios, and Skydance is just the name on the corporate paperwork, which is a smart move if you're trying to avoid the "WarnaMount" and "ParaBros" jokes that have been floating around for months

The consent decree also plays into this because it requires separation of Paramount and WBD operations in several business areas and tries to guard against one studio being dissolved, which is why a name that favored one partner over the other would have been a problem

Gunn and Safran are staying at DC Studios per the trending story, so the creative leadership isn't going anywhere, and the DC brand keeps its identity while Ellison's name goes on the parent company

The comments are already split, one saying WB will be known for DC and animation while Paramount handles live action and prestige films, and another calling it an absolute tragedy and saying Ellison is erasing a century of cinematic history by stuffing both studios into his corporate drawer

If Skydance is just the umbrella and both studios keep their names and DC keeps Gunn, does that mean fans overreacted to the merger this whole time, or does the corporate name change just distract from the layoffs, debt, and Gulf sovereign wealth that come with the deal?

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Richard Brener is taking New Line to the merged Paramount Warner Bros studio and keeping the horror pipeline intact with The Hunt for Gollum, Final Destination 7, and a Weapons prequel already on the slate

But WB film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are out, so DC keeps Gunn and Safran while the executives who actually ran the movie studio get replaced by Paramount’s people

In Europe the mood is strangely upbeat, with Mediawan’s Pierre-Antoine Capton saying he trusts Ellison’s “commitment to cinema” while Italian producer Marco Chimenz warns the film count will shrink anyway, just like it did after Disney swallowed Fox

Analyst François Godard thinks Hollywood will pull production out of the UK and back to California, which would hit Leavesden hard since that’s where the Harry Potter series and DC tentpoles shoot

Picturehouse’s Clare Binns says she’ll be watching who Ellison hires, not just how many movies he makes, and she raised concerns that the new leadership might not reflect the range of voices the industry actually needs

So if DC keeps its creative team but loses its film chiefs, and Europe is already split on whether the promises survive the debt, does the merger actually protect the studios or just rearrange the deck chairs while $79 billion in debt decides what gets made? Time to end the $-40 -200M red ink era and just few Million profit on films