HBO Max and CNN Have a New Owner With $82 Billion in Debt
Paramount completed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, 2026, and the combined company is now named Skydance. It starts with about $82.5 billion of debt on a pro forma basis, according to the statements in its own closing filing. For the people who pay for HBO Max and Paramount+, the date, the price and the account terms of a combined service are not set, because the company says only that the two “will unify into a single service over time”. Those same statements show $6.4 billion of net interest expense for 2025, which is 2.4 times what the two companies recorded separately and, by our comparison, slightly above the $6 billion floor of the yearly savings that management is targeting within three years.
Skydance debt, interest and savings target
On this page
- One company where there were two
- HBO Max and Paramount+ stay separate for now
- CBS News, CNN and the cable channels
- Half from investors, half borrowed
- The $6.4 billion interest figure in the filing
- The company’s plan for bringing the debt down
- Warner’s 2022 merger, as its own filings record it
- The promises twelve states obtained
- Signs that the plan is working or slipping
- Frequently asked questions
One company where there were two
Warner Bros. Discovery stopped being a separate public company on October 6, 2026, and it is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the company that used to be called Paramount Skydance. The buyer renamed itself Skydance Corporation the same day and moved its shares from Nasdaq, where the ticker was PSKY, to the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SKYD, as the closing announcement states. Warner’s shareholders received $31.01666668 in cash for each share, and Warner’s own Form 8-K puts the total paid to them at approximately $78 billion.
What sits under one roof now is a long list. The release names two film studios (Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.), HBO Max and Paramount+, the CBS network, HBO, the cable channels of both companies, CBS News and CNN, and sports on CBS and TNT. The company describes itself as having “200+ million streaming subscribers across platforms” and “nearly $70 billion in revenue”, and both figures are its own.
David Ellison is chairman and chief executive, and Ynon Kreiz, who had been chairman and chief executive of the toy maker Mattel since 2018, has been co-chief executive since October 5 under an appointment the board made on September 27. In the leadership announcement the company said Ellison would look after long-term strategy and creative direction while Kreiz handles day-to-day management and the work of putting the two businesses together. The Ellison family and RedBird Capital hold every voting share, so the public shares carry no vote.
HBO Max and Paramount+ stay separate for now
Nothing about your subscription has been announced. The closing release has one sentence on the subject, which says consumers can expect “significant improvements to its direct-to-consumer streaming products, which will unify into a single service over time.” It does not say when, what the single service would be called, what it would cost, or what would happen to a household that pays for both today, and we found no filing that answers any of those questions.
The filings do show the size of what would be merged. Paramount+ had 81.6 million subscribers at June 30, 2026, up from 76.8 million a year earlier, according to Paramount’s quarterly report. Warner reported 131.6 million streaming subscribers at December 31, 2025, a 13% rise in a year, in its annual report for 2025. The two counts are taken six months apart and a home with both services appears in each, so they cannot be added into a number of distinct customers.
On price, the one hard figure in a filing is about the past. Paramount said the average monthly revenue it collects from a Paramount+ subscriber grew 12% to $8.52 in the second quarter of 2026 against the same quarter of 2025, and it credited “pricing increases and growth in Paramount+ subscribers” for the rise in its affiliate and subscription revenue. The measure divides all Paramount+ revenue, advertising included, by the number of subscribers around the world, so it is no price list and its rise is no measure of how much any household’s bill went up. It describes the business before the merger and says nothing about what comes after.
Some points are settled already. Casey Bloys, who has overseen HBO’s programming since 2016, was named in the leadership announcement to oversee original programming for both HBO Max and Paramount+. Under the court settlement described further down, the company has to keep Pluto TV, or an equivalent replacement, as a free streaming service paid for by advertising at its current level of service and quality for five years.
CBS News, CNN and the cable channels
CBS News and CNN have separate editors under the announced structure, and a new board is due to handle certain disputes about their reporting. The leadership announcement lists Mark Thompson as chairman and editor-in-chief of CNN Worldwide and Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, both reporting to the two chief executives. The settlement with the states adds a News Editorial Independence Board of 5 established journalists, which the company must set up within 180 days of closing, and which will write guiding editorial principles and resolve specified disputes about CBS News and CNN, including complaints about bias or fairness, as the company’s Form 8-K of September 30 describes it.
If you still pay for cable or satellite, the relevant promise is about how channels are sold. Providers pay the owners of channels a fee per subscriber, and those fees end up in the monthly bill. For five years Skydance has to negotiate the terms for Paramount’s basic cable channels separately from the terms for Warner’s, without making one deal depend on the other, and an uncured material breach would force it to sell six channels that the filing names, among them BET and Comedy Central. The California Attorney General’s office, which led the states, said the separate negotiations preserve the existing competition between the two groups, and that “preserving competition helps to keep prices down for consumers.”
Moviegoers get the most specific commitments. The company has to release at least 30 films a year in United States theaters for two years and 32 a year for the three years after. Each film counted toward that total needs at least 45 days in theaters and cannot be offered on a subscription streaming service for at least 90 days after it first opens in the United States. The rule covers the films counted toward the commitment, and it does not say which service a film goes to afterwards or when.
Half from investors, half borrowed
About half of the cash came from investors buying new shares and the rest was borrowed. The filing’s own table of what was paid starts with $78.0 billion for Warner’s shareholders, adds $1.1 billion for employee stock awards that had already vested and $14.7 billion to pay off loans Warner owed, and arrives at a total cash consideration of $93.8 billion.
Show the data
| Part | Value | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Paid to Warner shareholders | $78.0B | 83.2% |
| Warner term loans repaid | $14.7B | 15.7% |
| Vested employee awards | $1.1B | 1.1% |
The investor half was large by any measure. A group led by the Ellison family and RedBird, joined by the Public Investment Fund, the Abu Dhabi fund L’imad, the Qatar Investment Authority and LionTree, bought 3,917,657,246 new non-voting shares at $12.00 each, per the closing Form 8-K, which multiplies out to $47.0 billion. The price was set by a formula with a floor of $12.00 and a ceiling of $16.02, and the floor is what applied.
The borrowed half is where the yearly cost comes from. Skydance sold $30.0 billion of first lien notes, which are bonds whose holders have the first claim on the company’s assets, at interest rates that run from 6.300% for notes due in 2028 to 8.900% for notes due in 2066. It sold another $12.4 billion of second lien notes at a higher average rate (8.60%, against 7.48% for the first lien notes, in the filing’s pro forma figures), and it took $9.5 billion and $5.0 billion in two kinds of bank loans. Our sum of those pieces is $56.9 billion of new debt. A $49.0 billion backup loan that lenders had promised was never drawn.
The $47.0 billion and the $56.9 billion add up to more than the $93.8 billion paid, and the filing shows where the difference went. The pro forma statements also count $2.4 billion to buy back some of Warner’s older bonds and $3.9 billion to close a Warner facility that borrowed against customer invoices, along with fees, and they leave the rest as cash.
Why the deal is given different prices. When California sued in July, its attorney general’s office called this a “$110 Billion” merger. The filings say $78.0 billion was paid to shareholders. Adding the $32.4 billion of debt Warner already carried at June 30, 2026 gives $110.4 billion by our arithmetic, which is how a figure of that size appears to be built. Neither number is what Skydance now owes. Paramount also paid a $2.8 billion fee to Netflix in February, when Warner ended an earlier agreement with Netflix to sign this one, and the filing counts that fee as a cost of the purchase.
The $6.4 billion interest figure in the filing
The closing filing shows $6.4 billion of interest expense for a single year, and the figure rests on its pro forma statements. Pro forma means the accountants rebuilt past results as if the merger and its financing had already been in place, here from January 1, 2025. On that basis the combined company had $80.3 billion of long-term debt and $2.2 billion due within a year at June 30, 2026, which is the $82.5 billion in our headline, against $7.9 billion of cash.
The same statements show $6,435 million of net interest expense for 2025. On the same table, Paramount’s interest expense for that year was $760 million and Warner’s was $1,879 million, so the two together recorded $2,639 million and the combined company would have recorded 2.4 times as much. Divided by 365, the pro forma figure is the equivalent of about $17.6 million a day, by our arithmetic.
This is an accounting expense, which is a different thing from the cash interest the company pays. The 2025 figure includes $478 million for spreading out the costs of arranging the debt and for writing off the fees on the backup loan, part of which will not repeat. The first half of 2026 shows $3,090 million on the same basis, which doubles to about $6.2 billion for a year.
Show the data
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| The two companies separately | $2.6B |
| Combined, pro forma | $6.4B |
A comparison with sales makes the weight easier to judge. Pro forma revenue for 2025 was $66,132 million, so interest expense would have equaled about 9.7 cents of every dollar of revenue. For Paramount alone the share was 2.6 cents and for Warner alone it was 5.0 cents, by our division of the figures in the same table.
The numbers to remember. Pro forma debt is $82.5 billion at June 30, 2026. Pro forma interest is $6.4 billion for 2025 and $3.1 billion for the first half of 2026. The first half of 2026 shows operating income of $172 million before that interest, and a net loss of $2.1 billion after it.
Those profit lines need a caution, and the filing gives it. The pro forma operating income is struck after $4.2 billion of depreciation and amortization in six months, of which about $1.1 billion is added by the accounting for the purchase. Operating income is no measure of cash, so these lines cannot show by themselves how comfortably the interest can be paid. The filing also says the statements “do not give effect to revenue synergies, operating efficiencies or cost savings”, and that they are “presented for illustrative purposes only”. They are a picture of the starting point, and they are no forecast.
Most of the new debt carries a fixed rate. The bank loans float with market rates, and the company estimates that a move of 1 percentage point changes its yearly interest by $145 million.
How we calculated. Every input is from Exhibit 99.2 of the Form 8-K filed on October 6, 2026. Total debt is long-term debt of $80,323 million plus current debt of $2,158 million. It is the amount carried on the pro forma balance sheet, which records Warner’s older bonds $4.2 billion below their previous value, so the face amount owed is higher. The interest shares divide net interest expense by revenues for 2025 in each column of the pro forma statement of operations. Paramount’s 2025 column is the adjusted one the filing uses, which combines Paramount Global and Skydance Media before August 7, 2025 with the merged company after that date. Our editorial policy explains how we handle calculations of this kind.
The company’s plan for bringing the debt down
Management’s answer is savings, growth in streaming and time. The closing release targets “$6 billion-plus in run-rate synergies over the next three years”, with run-rate meaning the yearly pace of savings once every cut has been made. It says they will come “primarily from technology, integration and procurement, marketing and real estate rationalization”. The release does not give a number of jobs.
Set next to the interest, that target is the comparison in our lead, and the two halves are different kinds of number. The $6.4 billion is the interest expense the combined company would have recorded for 2025 on the pro forma basis, of which about $3.8 billion is the increase over what the two companies recorded separately. The $6 billion is the floor of a goal for a yearly pace of savings that management expects to reach within three years. One is an illustration of the starting cost and the other is a plan, and the comparison says nothing by itself about whether the debt can be carried.
The company gives two more targets. It aims to bring its debt ratio down to 3.0 times by the end of 2029. The release does not define the ratio; as such ratios are usually built, it is debt minus cash, divided by a year of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, so 3.0 times would mean owing three years of those earnings (our guide to net debt walks through the measure). It also expects more than $10 billion of free cash flow by 2030, while it says its content spending ran above $30 billion over the last twelve months.
These are the company’s forecasts, and its own release lists among its risks that it “may not achieve the expected run-rate synergies” or its debt and cash flow goals. In its September 30 filing the company added that it does not expect the commitments made to the states to have a material effect on reaching its savings and debt targets.
Warner’s 2022 merger, as its own filings record it
Half of Skydance has been through a merger like this before, and its filings record how that one went. When Discovery agreed to combine with AT&T’s WarnerMedia in 2021, its management told investors, in a call transcript filed with the SEC on May 17, 2021, “we expect at least $3 billion of cost synergy alone phased in post close and that will likely take around 2 years to complete.” The same speaker expected gross debt to be “around 3x” yearly earnings “24 months post close.”
The merger closed on April 8, 2022, and debt went from $15.2 billion for Discovery alone at the end of 2021 to $49.3 billion at the end of 2022, as the 2022 annual report shows. The company ended 2022 with net debt at 5.0 times its adjusted earnings. At the end of 2023, about 21 months after closing, its earnings release gave 3.9 times on the same net basis, which is a lower measure than the gross one used in the 2021 target because cash is subtracted. (The releases count gross debt slightly differently from the annual reports’ debt table, which our chart uses and which shows $44.0 billion for that date.)
Show the data
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| 2021 | $15.2B |
| 2022 | $49.3B |
| 2023 | $44.0B |
| 2024 | $39.5B |
| 2025 | $32.8B |
| June 2026 | $32.4B |
The debt did keep falling. It stood at $32.4 billion at June 30, 2026, according to Warner’s last quarterly report, which is $16.9 billion or 34% below the 2022 level. The same years carried other charges. The 2024 annual report says $4.7 billion of restructuring charges had been booked by the end of that year, and that the company expected $1.0 billion to $1.5 billion of the whole program to be paid in cash. It also records a $9.1 billion write-down of goodwill on the cable networks in the second quarter of 2024, which used no cash. A write-down is an admission in the accounts that a business is worth less than the value it was carried at.
The two deals were built differently, and both relied on debt. In 2022 AT&T’s shareholders were paid $42.4 billion in Discovery shares, and before the merger WarnerMedia distributed $40.5 billion to AT&T in cash, debt securities and debt it kept, which is where the jump in borrowing came from. This time Warner’s shareholders were paid in cash, with $47.0 billion of new money from investors beside the new debt.
What carries over is the business underneath. Warner’s revenue in the second quarter of 2026 was $8,717 million against $9,812 million a year earlier, an 11% fall, and its cable networks reported a 10% decline in domestic linear subscribers, meaning homes with traditional pay television. Those networks still produced $1,446 million of the adjusted earnings Warner reports by segment in that quarter, against $512 million from streaming. History of this kind describes the starting conditions and does not tell anyone how the new company will do.
The promises twelve states obtained
The merger closed only after a court settlement, and its terms are binding for five years. California and 11 other states sued on July 13, 2026 to block the deal, arguing it would lead to higher prices and less content. They settled on September 21, and on September 30 a federal court in California entered the settlement as a consent decree, meaning an agreement that a judge can enforce. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said at the time, “This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger.”
| Subject | What Skydance committed to, per its September 30 filing |
|---|---|
| Films in theaters | At least 30 a year for two years, then 32 a year for three years, with at least 4 independent films each year |
| If it falls short | After a six-month period to fix the shortfall, it must sell Miramax, and it must also contribute $30 million for each missing film to industry health, retirement and other funds |
| Production in the United States | At least $300 million more each year than the two companies spent in 2025, or $1.5 billion over five years; the Paramount and Warner Bros. studio lots cannot be sold or closed |
| Cable channels | Separate negotiations for the two channel groups; an uncured material breach means selling BET, VH1, Comedy Central, Smithsonian, Destination America and Science |
| Free streaming | Pluto TV or an equivalent stays free and supported by advertising |
| News | A 5-member News Editorial Independence Board for CBS News and CNN within 180 days of closing |
| Workers | $9.5 million a year for five years for training, film programs and arts organizations; existing union contracts honored |
| Oversight | An internal compliance monitor, an independent monitoring trustee and reports every six months |
The company’s filing says the decree is no admission that it broke any law. A separate settlement with the Writers Guild of America includes a $17.5 million payment to the writers’ health fund and a floor under the number of guild-represented staff at CBS News Broadcast.
Show the data
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2026-01-19 | Warner signs an amended deal with Netflix |
| 2026-02-27 | Warner ends it and signs with Paramount |
| 2026-07-13 | 12 states sue to block the merger |
| 2026-09-21 | The states and the companies settle |
| 2026-09-30 | A federal court enters the decree |
| 2026-10-06 | The deal closes as Skydance |
Signs that the plan is working or slipping
The earliest evidence will be in the company’s reports, and most of it has dates. The annual report for 2026 will be the first with a real combined balance sheet, which will replace the pro forma figures used here, and the accounting for the purchase can still be revised for up to a year after closing. Readers who want to follow it can watch a short list.
- The debt total in each quarterly report against the $82.5 billion starting point, and the interest expense against the same period of the pro forma statements.
- Cash from operations, spending on content and debt actually repaid, which the pro forma statements do not show.
- How much of the $6 billion savings target the company says it has reached, and what it spent on restructuring to get there.
- Any announcement of the single streaming service, with its date, its price and what happens to people who hold both subscriptions.
- The News Editorial Independence Board, which is due within 180 days of closing, so by early April 2027 on our count.
- The number of films released each year against the 30 the decree requires, and the monitoring reports due every six months.
- Market interest rates, since each percentage point moves the cost of the bank loans by $145 million a year.
Falling debt, compliance with the film commitments and streaming growth would indicate progress, and judging the plan also takes a comparison of the savings realized, the cash generated and the debt ratio with management’s targets and their deadlines. The 9.7 cents of interest expense per dollar of revenue is a way to describe the scale of the starting point, and it will be worth setting the reported figures beside it, though the earnings of each segment and the cash flow statement will say more about how the plan is going.
Frequently asked questions
Is HBO Max merging with Paramount+?
The company says its streaming services “will unify into a single service over time”, in the release that announced the closing on October 6, 2026. It has given no date, no name and no price for that service. Until it does, HBO Max and Paramount+ remain separate subscriptions.
Will HBO Max or Paramount+ prices go up after the merger?
No price change tied to the merger appears in any filing or company release we read. Paramount’s quarterly report shows that average monthly revenue per Paramount+ subscriber rose 12% to $8.52 in the second quarter of 2026, before the deal closed. Nobody outside the company can say from the public record what a combined service will cost.
How much did Paramount pay for Warner Bros. Discovery?
Warner’s shareholders received $31.01666668 a share in cash, about $78.0 billion in total. Including Warner loans that were repaid and employee stock awards, the total cash consideration in the filing is $93.8 billion. Figures near $110 billion appear, by our arithmetic, to add the debt Warner already carried.
What happened to WBD stock?
Each share was converted into the right to receive $31.01666668 in cash, and the stock stopped trading on Nasdaq on October 6, 2026. The combined company trades on the New York Stock Exchange as SKYD, the ticker that replaced PSKY the same day.
Who owns CNN and CBS now?
Both belong to Skydance Corporation. The Ellison family and RedBird Capital hold all of its voting shares, according to the closing release. CNN and CBS News keep separate editors, and a 5-member editorial independence board is due within 180 days of the closing under the settlement with 12 states.
Where can I follow Skydance on StockTitan?
The Skydance overview page carries the company’s news and filings as they arrive, and the financials page will show the combined results once they are reported. Our guides to Form 8-K filings and the interest coverage ratio explain the documents and the measure behind these figures, and the compound interest calculator shows how a rate turns into dollars over time.
Sources
- Paramount completes acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, press release on StockTitan
- Leadership team announcement, press release on StockTitan
- Skydance company overview on StockTitan
- Skydance Corporation, Form 8-K filed October 6, 2026
- Skydance Corporation, closing press release (Exhibit 99.1)
- Skydance Corporation, unaudited pro forma condensed combined financial statements (Exhibit 99.2)
- Warner Bros. Discovery, Form 8-K filed October 6, 2026
- Paramount Skydance, Form 8-K filed September 30, 2026 (consent decree)
- Paramount Skydance, Form 8-K filed October 1, 2026 (co-chief executive)
- Paramount Skydance, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026
- Warner Bros. Discovery, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026
- Warner Bros. Discovery, Form 10-K for 2025
- Warner Bros. Discovery, Form 10-K for 2024
- Warner Bros. Discovery, Form 10-K for 2022
- Warner Bros. Discovery, fourth-quarter 2022 earnings release
- Warner Bros. Discovery, fourth-quarter 2023 earnings release
- Discovery, Form 425 filed May 17, 2021 (investor call transcript)
- California Attorney General, lawsuit announcement of July 13, 2026
- California Attorney General, settlement announcement of September 21, 2026
The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice, investment recommendation, or an endorsement of any particular investment strategy. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.