Just When The Dust Started To Settle …
With Paramount seeking even bigger changes, now where will Star Trek end up?
It was just a few short weeks ago that we were all breathing a collective sigh of relief as Paramount and Skydance Media finally closed their long awaited merger, and we Star Trek fans began speculating how our favorite franchise would fare under this new regime.
It turns out: Not so fast!
The new combined Paramount/Skydance led by David Ellison has other plans.
News is out that Ellison’s Paramount/Skydance is teaming up with the fat wallet of his father — Oracle founder Larry Ellison — in preparing a bid to acquire Warner Bros Discovery.
The new combined company would be massive, and it’s a case of a smaller Paramount/Skydance trying to buy the much larger Warner Bros Discovery.
It would create a new partnership and mix of a dizzying number of streaming services, studios, TV networks and ancillary properties.
No formal offer is yet on the table, and talks could yet collapse.
For our purposes, though, what would this mean for Star Trek?
Of course, there are no definitive answers.
We were waiting for those in the wake of the Paramount/Skydance tie-up.
Under this new scenario, it’s even harder to predict.
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“This makes tons of both strategic and economic sense,” Bloomberg Intelligence senior media analyst Geetha Ranganathan told Yahoo Finance on Friday. “Both Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are relatively sub-scale players in streaming. Put them together and you’re talking about 200 million subscribers, a top five global player.”
Clearly, Paramount’s own in-house streaming service, Paramount Plus, has been struggling.
So this new, potential boost could well get Star Trek in front of millions of new eyeballs.
And that’s something franchise observers have been calling for, to position Star Trek for growth and to gain new audiences.
On the downside, Star Trek suddenly would be elbowing many more franchises and media properties for resources and attention.
This would include Superman, Batman, and all of Warner Bros’ other marquee DC superhero properties.
And, of course, planning and executing such a huge new potential merger will take time and attention.
Will decisions on the future of Star Trek slide to the back burner as the focus of Paramount’s executives is elsewhere?
Only time will tell.
And we fans potentially are back to a game of speculating … and waiting.
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MOMENT FOR TREK
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