Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison sees HBO Max and Paramount+ combining into a single service over time after a “short-term” phase as separate-but-bundled services.
“Long-term, the plan is basically to bring them together,” Ellison said at a press event held on the Paramount lot to mark the closing of the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. “It’ll take a period of time to do that. So, I think in the immediate [term], you will see them operated separately, with things like bundling or things that you’ll be able to see accelerated in the relatively short term. I can’t be specific about that yet today.”
Ellison said the centralization of tech stacks after the merger close will happen “as quickly as possible,” noting that the project was completed “in record time” after Skydance took over Paramount in August 2025.
Across the streaming landscape, a number of players have found it complex and expensive to meld two services into one. Disney has been chipping away at a long-term positioning of Disney+ as its mother ship and Hulu programming migrating there behind a home-screen tile. Sometimes, viewer feedback can cause a rethink, as was the case when WarnerMedia merged with Discovery Communications in 2022. Initially, executives pursued a plan to merge unscripted and lifestyle service Discovery+ with HBO Max under the new umbrella brand Max. Warner Bros. Discovery stepped back from that plan and also reversed the Max rebrand amid viewer and partner confusion and resistance.
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