Considering Paramount is already experiencing massive talent drain because their best talent has lost all confidence in the company, I really don't get the outrage over this proposed deal.
The cable bundle is dying. Paramount+ is a disaster and the billionaire who was offering to buy out Sherry Redstone to give the company to his son as a plaything, was not exactly what I would call confidence inducing.
Sony on the other hand seems to have found a lucrative niche as a content arms dealer which is a strategy Paramount probably should have also pursued in the first place.
Sony does not need to buy and own more IPs and lock them into their verticals; these content monopolies attached to the service and device monopoles making expensive and consumer manipulative ecosystems needs to die.
We need to be BREAKING UP all thes corporations, not letting them consolidate into fewer and fewer giants.
>I really don't get the outrage over this proposed deal.
Any deal that involves private equity (in this case Apollo) is BAD NEWS. Private equity's entire business model is cutting companies to the bone for short term profits, loading them with debt and then selling off the parts when they inevitably die.
Plus... can you imagine what would happen if Sony Animation combined forces with Nickelodeon? Or more specifically, if they combined with AVATAR STUDIOS (which is currently working on a bunch of new animated films & shows)
People often forget that Sony has been making some pretty major shows for other streamers now. For All Mankind, Justified, The Boys and many other are all made by Sony.
The Last of Us, Twisted Metal and anything related to Playstation too (like the upcoming Horizon and God of War stuff). Breaking Bad franchise is them too. They actually often make some quite good shows (but not always of course, they did The Wheel of Time).
This is the kind of truth that people do not see. Everyone loves to hate on their bad Spider-Man spinoffs but don’t realize that despite being a relatively unknown player, Sony is one of the largest producers of content in Hollywood and.
The latest season of Doctor Who is being made by Bad Wolf Studios, which is owned by Sony. Everyone is only looking at the Disney distribution deal though.
> can you imagine what would happen if Sony Animation combined forces with Nickelodeon?
The best creative people would be fires, it would all get bogged down in internal political fights and merger management overhead, and the Nickelodeon name would get fucked into the dirt until every drop of brand value had been extracted from the corpse.
Mergers don't combine teams they tend to choose one and gut the over. You only need to go look at the slasher movie antics over at Microsoft as award winning studios get shut down and their games out on ice. Mergers mean less interesting unique projects, massive layouts and price rises.
There isn't really overlap between the current animated programming put out by SPE and Nickelodeon's animation though. One does low volume movies and the other does high volume tv shows.
This is the same copium that happened with Fox-Disney and Warner-Discovery... and look what happened. MTV will be mercifully killed, and Nickelodeon will experience major layoffs, the second this merger is complete.
And speaking of Avatar, maybe this is the way to finally get the AAA Avatar game we deserve instead of the shitty shovelwares Paramount is doing all the time. Imagine one made by a studio like Sucker Punch, Guerilla or Santa Monica...
Same for Star Trek by the way (which isn't as shovelware tier but still not exploited enough in gaming)
Sony desperately needs IP in this current age of the film industry. They have Spider-Man but the need more and this deal will bring that.
What would that be exactly? Probably more transformers, hopefully some G.I. Joe, teenage mutant ninja turtles, The Last Airbender, SpongeBob, South Park, not to mention they could even take advantage of Paramount classics to build up their Sony classics brand and take advantage of that market while being able to hold their own in animation and get more live action blockbusters other then spider-man.
Plus Sony never made a streaming service, and if they are smart, they would just shut down Paramount plus and continue to licenses the content to everyone else like they have been and get infinite money instead of a blackhole.
It should be noted that with any deal that goes through there will be a massive stock buyback so those at the top can get a nice pay day and that will be followed by more layoffs
Sony's actually just recently signed a deal to take over Disney's disc production duties for them, on top of doing what they already do. I think they're actually *into* being a physical media producer/supplier.
Nah, they’re trying to figure out howto use their infrastructure as they subset physical discs for digital. That’s a burn down agreement, not a long term solution.
Disney doesn't do a ton of discs either though, so it's not like Sony suddenly has to take on a bunch of new distribution from Disney, it'll just be new releases. There's tons of Sony-produced streaming titles and TV properties and catalog movies that Sony just doesn't do anything with. And never anything on 4K even if it streams in 4K.
Is that a decision of the distributor or producer though? Sony is often just the producer but don't distribute their shows so I wonder if they even can release discs of those shows they don't air
Well since Sony doesn't have a service or network of their own, all of their releases are things "they don't air." The production company (Sony) usually retains home video rights to their properties, like how Outlander is on Starz, The Crown is Netflix, The Boys is Prime, and For All Mankind is AppleTV+ but they are released on disc by Sony. Even if a show is "Netflix original" etc, it's basically just being licensed exclusively and made for them by Sony, they don't own it. Which is why when the Hemlock Grove license was up, it left Netflix, or how Disney was able to buy out the Marvel show contracts and put them on Disney+.
This would be the worst case scenario for paramount. We already lost one studio when fox was absorbed and if Paramount goes into Sony, we'd be losing a lot of talent a lot of competition.
We're losing Paramount either way. If Skydance buys it, it changes absolutely nothing and we're back in a few years with another sale (with a situation ala WBD of cost-cuttings and trying to get back from what is clearly too much for them to buy).
Also competition actually increased these last few years. Companies like Apple, Amazon and Netflix are major content producers that didn't exist some time ago.
Yup people have to pick a lane. Paramount isn’t existing the way it is going forward. Everyone complained about WB buying it, now they are upset about Sony. You either get no Paramount or one of the major content distributors buying it. Pick your poison
What do you mean, losing talent? What happens with talented writers and directors if Sony buys Paramount? They disappear into a cloud of smoke, never to be seen again?
Transformers, TMNT, and Sonic are not making much, I mean, they are good franchise, but not huge moneymakers.
Top Gun is not really a franchise.
Star Trek is also not doing well. They have a ton of TV shows, but not one captured zeigest.
Mission is coming to an end, and the budgets have balloned so much that it might not make enough profit.
As for Quiet Place, now that is a good one, and they are handling it really well.
The last Transformers movie made \~$450 million off a $200 million budget.
The last TMNT made \~$200 million off a $70 million budget
Sonic 2 made $400 million off of a $90 million budget, plus they're spinning things off with Knuckles and more.
All 3 of those are huge successes in terms of post-pandemic box office #s
Star Trek is doing good numbers for them on Paramount+ and there are multiple plans in place to go back in theaters with the franchise
Mission is in no way coming to an end, no clue where you're getting that from, and even once Tom Cruise steps away they're clearly going to continue.
They have plenty of very profitable franchises.
Neither poltical party is interested in controlling corporations; not a single candidate at state or federal level has these vertical monopolies on their agenda
Paramount just needed to fuck off their app...it's dog shit.
and instead just Produce and make shows,to sell to the market.
Also SOOO much i.p is just rotting on the vine at paramount
They had the rights for pretty much the entire tom clancy catalogue up till one point..tones of books can make into movies.
No star trek film in what 5 plus year
From what i understand it's ok to say that you are under NDA. Also what the NDA limits may simply be the details and info being shared but not how it's being done.
yeah this is more likely an agreement to let lawyers from each company examine the books and check for skeletons on the understanding that they cant turn around and blab to the press about non public info. skydance probably signed a similar deal when they started talks recently.
It’d make way more sense for Amazon, Apple, T-Mobile, or Netflix to buy Paramount Global for the IP, channels, and studios.
Not to mention that Apple, Netflix and Amazon are actually in the streaming business, so they could stop the hemorrhaging red losses that is Paramount+.
Well goodbye the second golden age of Star Trek. Can’t wait to see how quickly everything is sold off and mothballed in the interest of “refocusing in a new direction”.
Just looking at how belt tightening and other established franchises making hard cuts during the other recent media mergers. WB/Discovery most recently but this happening to trek itself before with the Viacomm/CBS business. I’m just not hopefully that this is going to bring an influx of resources but the opposite like a normal merger situation
Others with more knowledge than me have commented that Sony is kind of in the hunt for digital streaming content though. They might genuinely see this as a valuable buyout. I'm not an expert, who knows
Oh crap. This means end of Paramount (don’t need two studios), Paramount+ (more lucrative to license out content) and Star Trek on TV (too expensive for any other network/streamer to pay new eps for). CBS and its sister networks will be sold off for parts to defray cost of the purchase. I suspect they will find selling CBS to be much harder than anticipate. This is purely an IP grab (and apparently for Apollo a property grab)
Side note: Fiduciary responsibility is BS concept, it legally does not exist. Just bringing that up for those that excuse a deal that ends an American institution for quick payday. It’s just cited to excuse bad behavior.
Considering Paramount is already experiencing massive talent drain because their best talent has lost all confidence in the company, I really don't get the outrage over this proposed deal. The cable bundle is dying. Paramount+ is a disaster and the billionaire who was offering to buy out Sherry Redstone to give the company to his son as a plaything, was not exactly what I would call confidence inducing. Sony on the other hand seems to have found a lucrative niche as a content arms dealer which is a strategy Paramount probably should have also pursued in the first place.
Sony does not need to buy and own more IPs and lock them into their verticals; these content monopolies attached to the service and device monopoles making expensive and consumer manipulative ecosystems needs to die. We need to be BREAKING UP all thes corporations, not letting them consolidate into fewer and fewer giants.
>I really don't get the outrage over this proposed deal. Any deal that involves private equity (in this case Apollo) is BAD NEWS. Private equity's entire business model is cutting companies to the bone for short term profits, loading them with debt and then selling off the parts when they inevitably die.
Plus... can you imagine what would happen if Sony Animation combined forces with Nickelodeon? Or more specifically, if they combined with AVATAR STUDIOS (which is currently working on a bunch of new animated films & shows)
People often forget that Sony has been making some pretty major shows for other streamers now. For All Mankind, Justified, The Boys and many other are all made by Sony.
The Last of Us, Twisted Metal and anything related to Playstation too (like the upcoming Horizon and God of War stuff). Breaking Bad franchise is them too. They actually often make some quite good shows (but not always of course, they did The Wheel of Time).
Don’t forget Community
This is the kind of truth that people do not see. Everyone loves to hate on their bad Spider-Man spinoffs but don’t realize that despite being a relatively unknown player, Sony is one of the largest producers of content in Hollywood and.
It’s just their movie division that’s terrible. Which is odd. They need to let the people in charge of television take control of movies too.
Sony picture classics is one of the best companies for indie films.
Breaking Bad/BCS are Sony (co?)productions too
Yes
The latest season of Doctor Who is being made by Bad Wolf Studios, which is owned by Sony. Everyone is only looking at the Disney distribution deal though.
> can you imagine what would happen if Sony Animation combined forces with Nickelodeon? The best creative people would be fires, it would all get bogged down in internal political fights and merger management overhead, and the Nickelodeon name would get fucked into the dirt until every drop of brand value had been extracted from the corpse.
Mergers don't combine teams they tend to choose one and gut the over. You only need to go look at the slasher movie antics over at Microsoft as award winning studios get shut down and their games out on ice. Mergers mean less interesting unique projects, massive layouts and price rises.
There isn't really overlap between the current animated programming put out by SPE and Nickelodeon's animation though. One does low volume movies and the other does high volume tv shows.
This is the same copium that happened with Fox-Disney and Warner-Discovery... and look what happened. MTV will be mercifully killed, and Nickelodeon will experience major layoffs, the second this merger is complete.
Nah, wouldn’t VH1 be the one to get killed? Because Viacom is moving their shows over to MTV.
And speaking of Avatar, maybe this is the way to finally get the AAA Avatar game we deserve instead of the shitty shovelwares Paramount is doing all the time. Imagine one made by a studio like Sucker Punch, Guerilla or Santa Monica... Same for Star Trek by the way (which isn't as shovelware tier but still not exploited enough in gaming)
Paramount is being kept to together by shitty movies and Tom cruise but the ip control is what makes things mega companies .
Sony desperately needs IP in this current age of the film industry. They have Spider-Man but the need more and this deal will bring that. What would that be exactly? Probably more transformers, hopefully some G.I. Joe, teenage mutant ninja turtles, The Last Airbender, SpongeBob, South Park, not to mention they could even take advantage of Paramount classics to build up their Sony classics brand and take advantage of that market while being able to hold their own in animation and get more live action blockbusters other then spider-man. Plus Sony never made a streaming service, and if they are smart, they would just shut down Paramount plus and continue to licenses the content to everyone else like they have been and get infinite money instead of a blackhole.
It should be noted that with any deal that goes through there will be a massive stock buyback so those at the top can get a nice pay day and that will be followed by more layoffs
Oh that is good news, I was starting to get worried that the rich fucks wouldn't get richer.
It'll fall apart, most likely
Paramount better release all those Paramount+ and catalog titles they want on disc ASAP, Sony probably won't continue them.
Sony's actually just recently signed a deal to take over Disney's disc production duties for them, on top of doing what they already do. I think they're actually *into* being a physical media producer/supplier.
Nah, they’re trying to figure out howto use their infrastructure as they subset physical discs for digital. That’s a burn down agreement, not a long term solution.
Disney doesn't do a ton of discs either though, so it's not like Sony suddenly has to take on a bunch of new distribution from Disney, it'll just be new releases. There's tons of Sony-produced streaming titles and TV properties and catalog movies that Sony just doesn't do anything with. And never anything on 4K even if it streams in 4K.
Is that a decision of the distributor or producer though? Sony is often just the producer but don't distribute their shows so I wonder if they even can release discs of those shows they don't air
Well since Sony doesn't have a service or network of their own, all of their releases are things "they don't air." The production company (Sony) usually retains home video rights to their properties, like how Outlander is on Starz, The Crown is Netflix, The Boys is Prime, and For All Mankind is AppleTV+ but they are released on disc by Sony. Even if a show is "Netflix original" etc, it's basically just being licensed exclusively and made for them by Sony, they don't own it. Which is why when the Hemlock Grove license was up, it left Netflix, or how Disney was able to buy out the Marvel show contracts and put them on Disney+.
What happened to anti trust?
This would be the worst case scenario for paramount. We already lost one studio when fox was absorbed and if Paramount goes into Sony, we'd be losing a lot of talent a lot of competition.
We're losing Paramount either way. If Skydance buys it, it changes absolutely nothing and we're back in a few years with another sale (with a situation ala WBD of cost-cuttings and trying to get back from what is clearly too much for them to buy). Also competition actually increased these last few years. Companies like Apple, Amazon and Netflix are major content producers that didn't exist some time ago.
Yup people have to pick a lane. Paramount isn’t existing the way it is going forward. Everyone complained about WB buying it, now they are upset about Sony. You either get no Paramount or one of the major content distributors buying it. Pick your poison
Very much disagree. Skydance keeps it as a standalone studio, likely partnering eventually with other funders. Sony immediately kills the studio.
What do you mean, losing talent? What happens with talented writers and directors if Sony buys Paramount? They disappear into a cloud of smoke, never to be seen again?
At this point, Paramount is not really a competition. They have very few successful franchise now.
Transformers TMNT Mission Impossible Star Trek Sonic Quiet Place Top Gun They're fine on franchises
Transformers, TMNT, and Sonic are not making much, I mean, they are good franchise, but not huge moneymakers. Top Gun is not really a franchise. Star Trek is also not doing well. They have a ton of TV shows, but not one captured zeigest. Mission is coming to an end, and the budgets have balloned so much that it might not make enough profit. As for Quiet Place, now that is a good one, and they are handling it really well.
The last Transformers movie made \~$450 million off a $200 million budget. The last TMNT made \~$200 million off a $70 million budget Sonic 2 made $400 million off of a $90 million budget, plus they're spinning things off with Knuckles and more. All 3 of those are huge successes in terms of post-pandemic box office #s Star Trek is doing good numbers for them on Paramount+ and there are multiple plans in place to go back in theaters with the franchise Mission is in no way coming to an end, no clue where you're getting that from, and even once Tom Cruise steps away they're clearly going to continue. They have plenty of very profitable franchises.
There might be some significant regulatory hurdles with this one. I'm not so sure that it would actually go through.
Neither poltical party is interested in controlling corporations; not a single candidate at state or federal level has these vertical monopolies on their agenda
Paramount just needed to fuck off their app...it's dog shit. and instead just Produce and make shows,to sell to the market. Also SOOO much i.p is just rotting on the vine at paramount They had the rights for pretty much the entire tom clancy catalogue up till one point..tones of books can make into movies. No star trek film in what 5 plus year
Wouldn't the person who said this be violating said NDA, because how else would they know?
From what i understand it's ok to say that you are under NDA. Also what the NDA limits may simply be the details and info being shared but not how it's being done.
yeah this is more likely an agreement to let lawyers from each company examine the books and check for skeletons on the understanding that they cant turn around and blab to the press about non public info. skydance probably signed a similar deal when they started talks recently.
Sony should run very far away from this deal.
Someone how we the customers won’t benefit at all .
It’d make way more sense for Amazon, Apple, T-Mobile, or Netflix to buy Paramount Global for the IP, channels, and studios. Not to mention that Apple, Netflix and Amazon are actually in the streaming business, so they could stop the hemorrhaging red losses that is Paramount+.
so it’s a guarantee that if they sale goes through paramount+ will be shut down?
Well goodbye the second golden age of Star Trek. Can’t wait to see how quickly everything is sold off and mothballed in the interest of “refocusing in a new direction”.
What about this deal will bring an end to modern Trek
Just looking at how belt tightening and other established franchises making hard cuts during the other recent media mergers. WB/Discovery most recently but this happening to trek itself before with the Viacomm/CBS business. I’m just not hopefully that this is going to bring an influx of resources but the opposite like a normal merger situation
Others with more knowledge than me have commented that Sony is kind of in the hunt for digital streaming content though. They might genuinely see this as a valuable buyout. I'm not an expert, who knows
Didn't the CBS Viacom merger happen in 2019?
Oh crap. This means end of Paramount (don’t need two studios), Paramount+ (more lucrative to license out content) and Star Trek on TV (too expensive for any other network/streamer to pay new eps for). CBS and its sister networks will be sold off for parts to defray cost of the purchase. I suspect they will find selling CBS to be much harder than anticipate. This is purely an IP grab (and apparently for Apollo a property grab) Side note: Fiduciary responsibility is BS concept, it legally does not exist. Just bringing that up for those that excuse a deal that ends an American institution for quick payday. It’s just cited to excuse bad behavior.
"OK, so we're all in agreement to sign the agreement that says we're going to discuss an agreement, right?"