Skydance Bosses Throw Shade On Warner Bros Film Slate; Q4 Profit Will Take $200M Hit

There’s a lot for Skydance co-CEOs David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz to be proud of in their purchase of Warner Bros. Read, as Ellison exclaimed on today’s Skydance Q3 earnings calls, “We have approximately $40 billion franchises which I think highly strengthen the overall portfolio” and that “a new movie will arrive on our service every other week; film is major driver of acquisition and engagement on our platforms.” However, not everything that glitters is gold, and that’s Warners. More specifically, Ellison wasn’t shy to acknowledge that Paramount is in better financial waters going forward than the Warner Bros side. Today’s Q3 Skydance earnings didn’t include the consolidated Warner Bros figures since the merger closed during Q4, however, Paramount brass painted a tainted future of what’s around the corner. The merger closed five weeks ago. Said Ellison at the top of the call, “The 2026 paramount film slate is expected to generate $500M more in lifetime profits than last year’s. We’ve now taken on another company with mixed results across the business HBO Max has performed well delivering revenue growth…” Watch on Deadline He added, “We do have some headwinds particularly in studios where the Warner bros film has underperformed this year and will weigh on Q4 results. We’ll apply the same playbook we did at Paramount, greenlighting more selectively, prioritizing profitable streaming growth over subscriber count, optimizing linear and driving efficiency through the cost structure.” “We’ve proven it works, and we’re confident it will work again,” emphasized Ellison who is still looking at $6 billion synergies from the merger. Kreiz mentioned at the top of the call about the merger, “What I’ve seen the various parts of the company are in strong shape. The Warner Bros Discovery team did a good job managing their business and delivered the expected result through the close with the one area of softness in the movie studio and we are looking to build on their good work.” Skydance CFO Dennis Cinelli drilled down further on the red ink from Warner Bros, which saw right before the merger a major bomb from the Burbank, CA lot, that being the Tom Cruise political satire Digger which cost $160M before global P&A and yielded $50.3M WW. Cinelli said, “For the full year, Warner bros is on track with our underwriting plan, with the exception of the near term film slate. And Paramount remains on track for our 2026 guidance which is including the high-end of the profitability range at $3.9 billion adjusted EBIDTA” The CFO added, “While the Paramount film slate continues to perform well, that will be more than offset by the continue underpeofmance of the Warner Bros. film slate. Based on this, we expect to have a $200M headwind to adjusted EBIDTA in Q4, that includes films already released quarter to date as well as films that we will release going forward.” The $200M headwind is essentially Digger, more or less. There was a report out there that Warner Bros 2026 slate was bound to lose $800M which we know from sources is absolutely false. The $200M loss figure that Cinellli cited in jibes with what we heard the overall Warners 2026 film slate losing, and that’s after the expected blockbuster success of Legendary’s Dune Part III delivering, even if Warners has a share of that. No, it hasn’t been a great year at the box office for Warner Bros with global box office misfires such as Supergirl, The Bride, Digger, and no film grossing over $100M domestic. However, the Burbank lot is slightly ahead of Paramount at the domestic box office for Jan. 1-Nov. 9, $569M (-70% vs. same frame in 2025) to $537M (+15% vs. ’25). Combined, the two studios count $1.1 billion at the domestic box office YTD ranking behind Universal ($1.9B), Disney ($1.6B) and Sony ($1.4B). Paramount’s high points have been Scream 7 ($121.9M domestic) and Scary Movie ($108.2M). In a further sign to Wall Street that they were cutting the fat, Skydance announced the departures or prolific filmmakers James Gunn and Peter Safran as DC Studios’ heads. They are being replaced by early aught Jeremy Latcham who departed the Disney owned studio in 2017 before the explosion of Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. Ellison wasn’t all poo-poo on Warner Bros. He gave props to New Line’s upcoming 2027 Christmas event title Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum calling the movie, “a compelling theatrical offering.”