Casablanca and Chinatown Now Share a Landlord

On October 6, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery become one company called Skydance. Chinatown and Casablanca now answer to the same boardroom. Whatever the press release says, that is one less studio, and I’ll admit it’s a bummer.

The money is the reason. Variety reports the combined company will carry more than $80 billion in debt, with Paramount issuing about $42.4 billion in bonds and Larry Ellison personally guaranteeing $46.7 billion in equity. David Ellison says the name is meant to keep both studios in the spotlight. A company that size has to feed the sequel machine first, and the strange little movie gets whatever is left.

But this is Hollywood, and it has always run in cycles. Gulf+Western swallowed Paramount in 1966 and handed it to Robert Evans, who went on to make Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather and Chinatown. The Kid Stays in the Picture, the documentary about his rise, is one of the most entertaining things you can watch about what a studio takeover does to the people inside it. I’d urge anyone to go find it.

Big mergers can wreck a place or wake it up, and the first greenlights will tell us which. I’m watching for the one weird, personal movie that still gets a yes.

Source: Variety.