At this afternoon’s newly merged Skydance presser, we asked when Barbie 2 would be a go project.

“Too early to talk about that,” was the official response from former Mattel CEO Ynon Kriez, newly named Skydance co-CEO. Kriez was involved in the first Warner Bros movie based on the famed Mattell blonde doll, that Warner Bros pic the highest grossing movie ever in the studio’s history with $1.44B at the global box office.

There was high drama before Paramount married Warner Bros as to whether the sequel was bound for a green light. Word was that former WBD CEO David Zaslav balked at paying increased wads of money for the CAA juggernaut repped Barbie team of stars Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, director Greta Gerwig, and her spouse and co-writer Noah Baumbach. In the meantime, a first look deal was made with Baumbach but at Warners specialty label, Clockwork (which were told at the time didn’t encompass Barbie 2). There was a ticking time clock as the film rights would revert back to Mattel at the end of the year, and the toymaker would have to start from scratch with a frosh project, and frosh talent.

Cooler heads are now prevailing, and it is day one at the new Skydance. Kriez is now on the other side of the equation, and one of several priorities for Skydance Motion Picture Group chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein is getting into the weeds that is Barbie 2. That among the 36 Warner Bros dated theatrical releases they’re inheriting and more. The duo need to figure out which state of development myriads projects are in, read, the Baz Luhrmann untitled film is not shooting yet, and reportedly in pre-production. That was another audacious big auteur swing from the previous Warners motion picture administration. A new draft is in the wings for Weapons prequel, Gladys, but it’s in need of a director if it’s going to make its September 2028 release date.

As far as Barbie 2 goes, stay tuned. Those heels aren’t necessarily made for walking. If there’s a takeaway from the new Ellison merger it’s to honor the legacies of each studios. Not erase them.

Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison sees HBO Max and Paramount+ combining into a single service over time after a “short-term” phase as separate-but-bundled services.

“Long-term, the plan is basically to bring them together,” Ellison said at a press event held on the Paramount lot to mark the closing of the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. “It’ll take a period of time to do that. So, I think in the immediate [term], you will see them operated separately, with things like bundling or things that you’ll be able to see accelerated in the relatively short term. I can’t be specific about that yet today.”

Already, the company has managed to bring together the tech stacks of Paramount+, BET+ and Pluto TV, a shift that subscribers and viewers do not notice. Ellison credited “the way AI technology and other things have progressed” for providing a boost to that process. He stopped short of saying outright that those advancements could simplify the cumbersome process of uniting streaming services into a single product. And he also did not address the pricing or strategy for consumer adoption and retention of a single service with multiple branded tiers, a puzzle that general-entertainment services have to solve as they gain scale.

Ellison said the centralization of tech stacks after the merger close will happen “as quickly as possible,” noting that the project was completed “in record time” after Skydance took over Paramount in August 2025.

Ellison’s projection, which came a few hours after the close of the Skydance merger, seemed to point in a different strategic direction than recent comments by Casey Bloys, head of HBO and HBO Max content. Bloys hinted that bundling would be the focus given the distinct subscriber bases of the two services, which combined have more than 200 million global subscribers. A slide deck released by Skydance earlier this week included images of both streamers, indicating at least they would both continue independently, at least for now.

Across the streaming landscape, a number of players have found it complex and expensive to meld two services into one. Disney has been chipping away at a long-term positioning of Disney+ as its mother ship and Hulu programming migrating there behind a home-screen tile. Sometimes, viewer feedback can cause a rethink, as was the case when WarnerMedia merged with Discovery Communications in 2022. Initially, executives pursued a plan to merge unscripted and lifestyle service Discovery+ with HBO Max under the new umbrella brand Max. Warner Bros. Discovery stepped back from that plan and also reversed the Max rebrand amid viewer and partner confusion and resistance.