Paramount Global Agrees to a Merger With Skydance For 8 Billion Dollars

Meanwhile, on Paramount mountain, where entertainment lives, the film and TV powerhouse is about to recieve quite the shakeup. After years of rumors, and competing buyers, Paramount Global has decided to bunker down and get together with a close partner: Skydance Media.

What is Skydance? Well, you may not know the name, but if you've been to the theaters these past few years, you know their work.

Founded in 2006, Skydance is a production company that has skyrocketed in value over the years, branching out from film, to television and games. A lot of that value came from their collaborations with Paramount to produce many of their blockbuster hits.

From Top Gun: Maverick, Mission Impossible: Fallout, Terminator: Dark Fate, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and Star Trek: Into Darkness, many of Paramount's flagship franchises have received modern entries done in collaboration with Skydance. So needless to say, they have a bit of a budding, co-dependent relationship. Paramount provides the IP, Skydance makes the goods, they all profit.

With all that said, it only makes sense the two would want to tie the knot and become one entity. As such. Skydance has agreed to buy National Amusements, a 77% stakeholder, and 50% of Paramount's Class B Shareholders for a total of 8 billion dollars. This gives them 2/3rds of the control over Paramount Global.

This is a massive increase compared to Skydance's rival bidder, Sony, who seems to have backed out from acquiring Paramount, leaving the prospects of that acquisition in the dust.

This is all in an attempt to bolster Paramount's value and help the struggling film company to climb about of their whopping 14.6 billion dollars in debt. This debt was brought on through excessive spending, underperforming theatrical releases and Paramount+ poor subscriber numbers, and they need a way out of the hole fast. 1.5 billion of the reported $8 billion dollar cost is to mitigate the ever-growing financial strain.

Now, I could go on and on about how this can affect Paramount's many brands, like CBS, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, etc. But I know why you're here.

What does this have to do with Sonic? Of course, it's too early to tell. But what I can provide is the list of relevant assets Paramount will have fully at their disposal upon the merger, and let you speculate for yourself:

• Skydance Films: Their major production branch for live action movie productions. Their latest project with Paramount was Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.
• Skydance Animation: Skydance's in-house animation studio. Their latest project was Apple TV+'s Luck.
• Skydance New Media: A video game studio dedicated to designing traditional console and PC experiences. Their next project is Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra.
• Skydance Interactive: Skydance's other video game studio devoted to designing VR experiences for devices such as the Meta Quest and PlayStation VR. Their latest project is Arashi: Castles of Sin - Final Cut.

What do you think of this acquisition, and do you think it will have any effect on the Sonic Cinematic Universe going forward? Feel free to discuss as this story develops!