Skydance Is a Decent Name, It’s Just Weaker Than Paramount or Warner Bros.

In the wake of David Ellison announcing that his combined Paramount-Warner Bros. company would be called Skydance, many on social media are making variations on the same comment: “Ellison just killed the legacies of both Warner Bros. and Paramount in one fell swoop,” bemoaned one New York Post. “Skydance is so weak.”

Ellison has reassured that the 103-year-old Warner Bros. brand and the 114-year-old Paramount brand will stick around. “We will honor what makes Paramount and Warner Bros. special — giving both studios the opportunity to grow, tell more great stories and bring those stories to even broader audiences around the world, powered by the scale and capabilities of Skydance,” he wrote in a statement announcing the branding change Friday.

Ellison revealed a logo menu that had Skydance front and center and large, orbited by tiny icons for brands like Warners and Paramount (along with CBS, HBO Max, DC, CNN and, perhaps just to balance out the graphic, Nickelodeon).

It’s unclear how much the Paramount and Warner Bros. brands will mean going forward. The optimistic parent-studio example would be something like Comcast owning Universal — audiences still think of Universal as its own thing. The pessimistic version is Disney buying 20th Century Fox — it kept the studio but dropped the “Fox,” and the label’s output shrank. Early signs, including Ellison’s leadership shakeups, point to a combined studio here as well. “Paramount” and “Warner Bros.” might remain strong entities … or could devolve into names used mostly for the movies and shows they’re stamped on rather than for actual companies.

Still, the naming decision looked rather egoic, didn’t it? You buy one iconic company, then buy a second iconic company, then slap your 20-year-old production company’s banner above both of them. It’s not quite a Trump-ian move — Ellison could have called the company ELLISON and then sat back and laughed at Mark Ruffalo’s rage tweets — but it’s certainly in the neighborhood of saying, “Hey, I won.”

And as corporate names go, Skydance isn’t terrible.

I know. The move this morning is to hate on it. But Skydance isn’t like … Comcast. Or Max. Or Tubi. Or Peacock. Or AMC Networks (relationship to AMC Theatres? None whatsoever!). Those are terrible.

Skydance just sounds very much like what it is: A circa 2006 production company that also feels vaguely Silicon Valley. One can imagine a Skydance Corp. making fintech products, data centers or dating apps. As such, it also seems very 21st century, which one supposes goes into the brand’s plus column.

And it doesn’t carry a fraction of the weight, gravitas, legacy, or brand recognition of the studios it effectively overtook.

Warner Bros. has the most value for consumers. The studio has 12,500 feature films and 2,400 TV programs. The name is so valued, it’s survived countless mergers and acquisitions (see Erik Hayden’s excellent history of the Warner Bros. and Paramount names).

Yet the name is also a relic — the legacy of Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack, the last of whom passed away nearly 50 years ago. One can understand Ellison not wanting to name the parent company after some studio bosses from the 1940s.

The Paramount library is considerably smaller, but the name was still a household name. The combined company could have kept Paramount on top. The name doesn’t feel particularly dated. So to whatever extent going with the name Skydance is a surprise, the surprise is that Ellison didn’t just stick with Paramount like Shari Redstone did when she merged CBS with her father’s company Viacom (now there’s a bad name — Viacom sounds like a villainous corporation from a 1980s Paul Verhoeven film).

Doing some combined monster like “Paramount Skydance Warner Bros. Discovery” would have been dreadful — a name that only a lawyer could love and a constant reminder of the ghost of mergers past.

Starting Tuesday, all this becomes Wall Street official when PSKY switches to SKYD on the ticker.

There’s a line from Raiders of the Lost Ark — which opens with the Paramount mountain fading into a similar-looking peak in South America — where the villain tells Indiana Jones that when you bury a trinket in the sand, and enough years pass, it becomes priceless. So who knows. Maybe with another 100 years of track record, Skydance will be a name worth to entertainment fans what Warner Bros. and Paramount are worth today. It’s just a long time to wait.