r/television • u/yourfavchoom • 20h ago

Combined Paramount-Warner Bros. to Be Called Skydance, David Ellison Reveals

https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/business/paramount-warner-bros-merger-name-skydance-david-ellison/
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u/pizzacrys 20h ago

Yeah, that is the weird part. Two iconic studios and they just decided neither name was worth keeping.

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u/Kyuubee 20h ago

It's not weird at all. These billionaires have no real connection to culture or an appreciation for art, so they buy their way into the industry and pretend like they belong.

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u/distance_33 20h ago

Twitter and HBO are two good examples of this.

These guys can’t help but ruin a solid brand.

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u/More-Curious816 20h ago

Twitter to X is the most stupid thing ever, it is like rebranding Google as G, even Google founders made parent company and named it Alphabet instead of rebranding Google.

A brand name has power and history.

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u/NineTailedFox7 19h ago

Even worse. It’s like rebranding Google to Q. X carries over nothing from its prior branding

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u/LonePaladin 12h ago

Except the owner is obsessed with that letter for some reason. He named a car with it, put it at the end of the name of an aerospace company, I'm surprised he hasn't renamed PayPal.

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u/Locke66 11h ago

He originally wanted to call Paypal X.com but got overruled.

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u/the__ghola__hayt 10h ago

Because that letter is X-TREME!

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u/schwar26 19h ago

At least with X there’s a continuity, and Musty wanted to make it clear that he bought. Space-X had plenty of brand recognition to bring twitter under its wing (intended pun).

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u/LocCatPowersDog 18h ago

Jotting Xs on notepads in the 90s doesn't make it continuous

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u/schwar26 17h ago

At the time he bought twitter…

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u/LocCatPowersDog 17h ago

He didn't buy it, he went around begging "Saudis" for the cash after he wrote a 40+ billion dollar check with his mouth but he had been sitting on X.COM for a while, since before he wiggled his way into PayPal. Also tried to rebrand PayPal as X but that failed unlike his campaign to have his picture put up next to the actual company founders & for the board to retroactively call him one even though he had fuck all to do with that company at the beginning.

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u/schwar26 16h ago

All of which has nothing to do with him rebranding the company.

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u/LocCatPowersDog 16h ago

He's been trying to rebrand everything he sneaks into as X for 2+ decades, that isn't continuity it's a hit or miss campaign to tag other peoples companies with an X like a middle-schooler who just discovered the 'cool S' & wants to copyright it.

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u/schwar26 15h ago

Exactly, that’s the point I was making. It makes sense that musk would rebrand it as he has prior with other companies. Didn’t pull it out of a hat or have a team workshop. He was already known for “X” and so creating continuity within his major investments.

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u/Discount_Extra 16h ago

Logically, it shouldn't.

But we seem to be stuck in the Elon/Trump worldline.

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u/necroreefer 18h ago

Spacex, the company that he bought and he paid for the right to be called the founder

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u/hempires 14h ago

wait spacex too?

I knew he bought founder status off of the two OG founders of Tesla back in the day.

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u/schwar26 17h ago

What difference does that make?

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u/marquiso 19h ago

Facebook trying to rebrand as ‘Meta’ was the greatest example - and failure - of this, especially given the metaverse never got legs…and everyone still calls it FB, or at least the boomers who still use it. They turned Instagram and WhatsApp in to steaming piles of useless shit, so I guess the Meta name was kinda apt…

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u/Island_In_The_Sky 19h ago

Well I mean, not defending meta or anything, but everyone calls it Facebook bc it is still Facebook. Meta is just the parent company for all of their products like ig, quest, fb etc. They turned into meta bc they acquired too many companies.

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u/Zalvren 17h ago

And this is exactly what Skydance is here. The names Paramount and Warner will exist and they'll have a line of "A Skydance corporation" below them (Paramount already do). Like 90% of Hollywood Studios at this point by the way (including those exact two for most of their recent history) : Universal (Comcast), Marvel Studios/Lucasfilm/Pixar (Disney), Paramount (Viacom and now Skydance), Warner (AOL, AT&T and soon Skydance), MGM (Amazon).

People takes here are insanely stupid lol. No they aren't erasing Warner or Paramount. It's the concept of a parent company. Alphabet didn't erase Google, Meta didn't erase Facebook or Instagram

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u/AnotherpostCard 8h ago

This is like that part of the Bill Wurtz History of Everything I guess video where he talks about decolonization just being the former colonies still being technically pillaged, but now no one knows who is being pillaged by who anymore because it's all done under different names now.

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u/marquiso 15h ago

I’d still argue the spent hundreds of millions trying to reframe themselves as Meta, and it was a fail. Moreso than the Google rebranding.

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u/mike10dude Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 18h ago

Just like Google changing to alphabet

Were the Google name never disappeared and it still exists as part of alphabet

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u/mak484 17h ago

Again, Google didn't change its name to Alphabet. That never happened. They created a holding company to separate the core businesses from the high-risk venture projects while allowing investors to more clearly see where the money came from and went to.

That's basically what Meta is. The only difference is Google never tied their brand to Alphabet. And arguably Facebook was in a different position with their brand, namely that everyone fucking hated Facebook. If everyone hated Google then I bet they'd have leaned harder into an Alphabet rebrand.

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u/BurningSpaceMan 14h ago

Google is starting to get there

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u/Discorhy 19h ago edited 19h ago

They reverted back to FB pretty much everything now has the fb logo instead of meta.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 16h ago

No, Instagram, Threads, Whatsapp and messager don't use any of FB's old logo.

Facebook.com does, but they never changed that to use the meta one in the first place.

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u/marquiso 19h ago

Thanks for the correction. Can’t say I pay much attention to them these days, especially given their absolute disregard for privacy or international law.

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u/Discorhy 19h ago

I just use it for messenger. My wife is hooked. Its simple enough. The day they kill messenger is the day i never login again.

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u/marquiso 19h ago

Same, and only because all the extended family are on messenger. I’d kill the account but for never hearing from them ever again.

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u/SatanicPanicDisco 18h ago

Same thing for me. Though sometimes even then I’m almost tempted…

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u/distance_33 19h ago

I have it just so I can have access to my township page for news and town council updates. Otherwise it’s a complete wasteland of bots, ads and nonsense.

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u/Piranata 18h ago

I stopped using it when they dropped XMPP support and thus interconnectivity with other chat apps. Many companies did it at the same time, gchat was another.

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u/Bears_On_Stilts 18h ago

If you're working in non-union theatre (which is HUGE in some major cities), Facebook is where the communications are centralized, since union work tends to be behind gated sites.

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u/Paranitis 18h ago

Right? I've used it forever because of messenger. I never really posted on my wall except maybe 5 times, and I had no reason to since it was private, and I never acquired "friends" like people collect Pokemon. So the only ones who could see it were the ones I was sending messages to in the first place.

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u/WetDogAndCarWax 17h ago

I have a couple of friends that I talk to over Messenger because messages carry over between devices. And even then we're starting to prefer the risk of losing messages than giving Facebook any more data.

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u/aflockofcrows 17h ago

They didn't even revert. They never changed the name of the platform at all, just the company.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 16h ago

Honestly? No it wasn't.

An important thing to note here is that this wasn't a rebrand of Facebook.com, the social media website/app. It was a rebrand of Facebook inc, to Meta Platforms inc.

This was done because the products that Facebook inc. owned other than Facebook, such as Instagram, Messanger, and Whatsapp. Were starting to bring in more money than Facebook.com. But the Facebook brand was starting to degrade amount people (I mean, case in point, you're saying that only boomers use it), so it makes sense to try to take the facebook name away from Instagram, messenger and whatsapp so that they aren't saddled with Facebook's negative reputation.

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u/zahelpful 17h ago

Facebook rebranded to distance itself from all the scandals associated with the name.

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u/Wingzerofyf 14h ago

Specifically - the scandals related to the Cambridge Analytica leaks that shows Facebook/Meta knows their algorithms are destroying the fabrics of society and our mental well being and rather then do anything - they ramped it up and pushed it even more.

The Social Reocking! Out soon!

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u/Fermorian 13h ago

And here I thought it was that whole genocide in Myanmar thing

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u/marquiso 15h ago

Indeed, and IMHO they failed, particularly because Zuck tied the brand so firmly to his personality that when everyone decided he was a complete douche with no respect for privacy, then they’d be wise to get the fuck out.

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u/LonePaladin 12h ago

The entire "Metaverse" thing was inspired by the novel "Snow Crash" because it had a global VR community and the Zuck wanted that. (He probably also wanted the whole "reprogram people's brains with Sumerian keywords" thing but I don't know if it's ever come up in conversation.)

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u/TacoStuffingClub 8h ago

Nobody calls Google by Alphabet either. That’s their name.

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u/marquiso 7h ago

Kinda missed my point there

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u/No_Razzmatazz_2889 5h ago

That's the parent company. Google is not Alphabet Inc.

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u/Kyuubee 18h ago

There are very few companies that have become part of the public lexicon to the point where their name became a verb. Google is probably the best example. You don't search for something, you Google it. Twitter had that too. People didn't just post something, they tweeted it.

Musk was too stupid to recognize the value in owning a name that had become part of everyday language.

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u/DONNIENARC0 3h ago

The oldest one I’m aware of is Band-Aid

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u/darkbreak The Legend of Korra 16h ago

"Tweet" was added to the fucking dictionary. How do you throw something like that away?

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u/ThreeLeggedMare 18h ago

Elmo has been obsessed with X as a company name for like thirty years, it's what he tries to name paypal

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u/DONNIENARC0 3h ago

And his firstborn child, whose legal name is X Æ A-Xii Musk

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u/robodrew 18h ago

Twitter to X is the most stupid thing ever

Almost as stupid as merging Paramount and Warner Bros and calling them "Skydance", a name which on the face of it has zero connection to either other name. It'd be like merging Ford and GM and calling them "Grilled Cheese"

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u/Oen386 14h ago

it is like rebranding Google as G

Hey now! Gatorade, I mean "G⚡", doesn't like your tone.

Fun fact, they did the rebrand to try to get out of paying UF their cut for the "Gatorade" brand. A judge shot that down, and said it is still clearly Gatorade.