Donna Langley, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment & Studios, is not a fan of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combining. “I think it is bad. I think it’s bad for everything,” she said bluntly, addressing the feature film market in particular.

“What this year has proven is, if you build it, they will come. Right? If you have the right mix of films in a steady diet for the audience, they’re going to show up. And we’re also cultivating this great habit with young people, who are coming to the cinema and we need to keep them there. So volume matters, and if we if we essentially lose a studio — which is I know not the stated plan and goal — but if we lose a studio, it’s bad … Look back at Fox-Disney. It wasn’t great, she said during a Q&A at the Bloomberg Screentime conference.

Paramount has committed to a legal settlement calling for the combined studios to release 30 theatrical films a year for the first two years post-merger, and 32 films for the following three years. The deal is expected to close next Tuesday.

Last fall, Universal detached the prolific Tyler Sheridan from his longtime studio home at Par for a new five-year film and television deal starting in early 2029. Asked how, Langley said, “Look, I think I saw an opportunity, with disruption and instability at moments where companies are going through something. And you know they are just moments to kind of look around the marketplace and see if there’s a competitive advantage. But really, where I started talking to Taylor was about film, because I knew that he had a film deal at Paramount but it was a first look deal, didn’t have as many teeth to it as his television deal. That’s how it started, and then we just got to talking, and one thing led to another.”

Split Looming

NBCU itself is in the midst of big corporate wrangling as parent Comcast plans to spin it off with Sky into a standalone, publicly traded company. “I’m mostly excited and optimistic about it. I’m not fearful of it at all, actually. I think it’s going to be good … Not to be tethered to a legacy business, Comcast, where the stock has struggled for a while, is a good thing.

“Now we are going to be the masters of our own destiny. It is more pressure. But in our neck of the woods, when you have to open movies, you know, however many times a year, there’s no more pressure than that.” She acknowledged “the scale question, of course,” but said it will be interesting for the slimmed down company to explore “at a moment of this real historical transformational change, what else can we be doing, and where else should we be playing in terms of growth.”

The split should be completed by mid-2027.

Box Office Run

The head of the number one movie studio in the world this year in the best overall box office since the pandemic, is more cautions about next year. “I think 2027 has a different complexion to it. I don’t think it has as much potential for the kind of big billion-dollar hits like this year, if you think about the breakouts, the ones that were surprises … But I think ‘28 will be kind of back again.”

“But you know, you really never know. I mean, I think if this year taught us anything, it was so exciting because it sort of reminds you that one of the fun things about this business is that surprises can always happen, good or bad. Luckily, it was good.”

Universal’s Christopher Nolan’s epicThe Odyssey is a juggernaut led and Obsession from Focus Features one of the year’s unexpected hits.

“They were both surprises for different reasons. I felt very confident that The Odyssey was going to cross a billion and then some. But the play-out pattern was so extraordinary. I mean, the fact that in week three we actually outgrossed the second week. It was just filled with surprises all the way along.”

Obsession “was just a good old-fashioned over-performing surprise. We knew we had something that could hit the cultural zeitgeist when we apparently, according to reports, overpaid for it in Toronto … We caught lightning in a bottle.”

The studio acquired the film for $15 million and it went on to gross over $500 million worldwide.

A survivor of multiple mergers, Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max Content, looked unfazed during the year-long saga of HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s sale and its many twists and turns.

First, he had seen this movie before — Bloys was HBO President of Programming when the network’s parent company Time Warner was acquired by AT&T and Content Chief for both HBO and HBO Max when renamed parent WarnerMedia was acquired by Discovery in 2022.

“You have to understand I’ve been through two mergers, I don’t think there’s any announcement that would have shocked me,” Bloys said Thursday at Bloomberg’s Screentime when asked whether he was shocked by Netflix’s (ultimately unsuccessful) deal to buy WBD.

Secondly, he knew his worth. A 22-year HBO veteran and one of the most universally admired TV executives working today, Bloys has become synonymous with the brand, which is one of WBD’s most valuable assets.

He has a close-knit team of executives, most notably head of drama Francesca Orsi and head of comedy Amy Gravitt who both have been at HBO as long as he has and have been key to its success, developing a string of award-winning hits each. They are expected to make the move to Paramount with him, along with HBO Max’s Sarah Aubrey, who is in charge of Emmy-winning The Pitt and Hacks, the upcoming Harry Potter series and also oversees international. (This past summer, Orsi was approached for a top programming job at Amazon MGM Studios but stayed at HBO, in part because of WBD’s strict contract terms but also as a sign that Bloys and his core team would likely transition to Paramount.)

Bloys and his team will be ready to move in when the Paramount-WBD merger officially closes Oct. 6 now that his Paramount counterpart, Chair of Direct to Consumer Cindy Holland, exited earlier this week, leaving Bloys as the presumed head of the combined streaming operation. (Bloys would not comment Thursday what his position would be exactly but did hint that HBO Max and Paramount+ may be bundled vs. merged.)

In getting the yet unspecified job, Bloys had timing on his side too. While the Warner Bros. film studio has stumbled after a banner 2025, HBO/HBO Max continued to do well throughout the sales process as Paramount CEO was mulling potential post-merger executive appointments. It had strong showings at the 2025 and 2026 Emmys and all of the TV awards races in-between and added several promising new series, GoT prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, It: Welcome To Derry, Rooster, Task, I Love LA and The Chair Company, all of which have been renewed, and Emmy-winning limited series DTF St. Louis.

Then there was the chatter about Bloys possibly going to Netflix for a job or a deal. It may have been much lunch about nothing — Bloys’ meal with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos was much-talked in March — but it underscored the fact that Bloys had options.

Asked at Screentime yesterday whether there had been talks between Netflix and Bloys, Sarandos skirted the question, calling Bloys “a super talented guy” who “is going to be in a very good position wherever he goes.” Bloys also drew praise from Disney’s President and Chief Creative Officer Dana Walden; she called him “an incredibly savvy executive” who “has demonstrated over a long period of disruption at Warner Bros. the ability to not reinvent himself but evolve” at the same event.

Still, Bloys, whose contract goes through 2027, was Paramount CEO David Ellison‘s to lose. The contract is said to include a stipulation that he reports to the company’s CEO, and that proved a key condition for Ellison to keep him (and by extension, Bloys’ senior team).

With neither Bloys nor Holland likely to report to the other if and when their platforms were combined, there could be only one, as the saying goes, with Ellison “optimizing for HBO stability,” as Holland put it in the goodbye note to staff, pointing to the choice.

Bloys made a similar comment Thursday, saying that he believes Ellison will “maintain what we’ve done” at HBO. (He may get two CEOs for the price of one as Ellison appointed Mattel’s Ynon Kreitz as co-CEO, with all businesses supposed to be reporting jointly to both.)

Broadening Out The Slate

For a decade, Bloys has been the steward of HBO as home of premium storytelling.

“There are no plans to dilute the HBO brand in favor of increasing volume of programming,” he said in 2018 when the AT&T acquisition was pending, adding that he and his team have plans to do “nothing different than curate excellence.”

Two mergers later, things have changed. He will preside over a combined streaming slate that mixes HBO’s prestige fare with CBS next-day procedurals and sitcoms as well as Paramount+ mass appeal originals such as the rosters of shows from Taylor Sheridan/101 Studios (Landman, MobLand) and Tyler Perry (Sistas) as well as UFC.

For Bloys, that would be the next step in a conetnt aperture widening that actually started a decade ago.

“Back in the 2015 years, the idea that you would take HBO and add the Warner Bros. library was radical, it was ‘Oh my God, you’re going to have HBO next to Friends and Big Bang Theory and ER, how could you do that?’,” he said Thursday. “A lot of hand wringing, and I would say that was a very successful broadening out of the service.”

The process does not always work; adding Discovery content to HBO Max was largely rejected by the audience, Bloys admitted, so there is some caution how Paramount+ and HBO Max lineups would go together (or alongside each other if bundled.)

“I was talking to someone earlier this week who said that HBO and Paramount+ basically have the two most divergent customer bases, that they, in a lot of ways, don’t mesh naturally,” Bloys said. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘Oh okay, so the Taylor Sheridan stuff and HBO’. It’s a version of what people said to us about HBO and the Warner Bros. library. People who watch HBO tend to like television, tend to be consumers of television, and that doesn’t just mean HBO.”

Bloys also brought up South Park, which now streams on Paramount+ but had a long and successful run on HBO Max, proving itself compatible on both.

“We had South Park on our platform, one of the big properties at Paramount+. It did so well, we sued them when they [sent specials to P+],” he said Thursday.

Bloys has already taken steps in that direction with HBO Max fare, which may provide a blueprint for how he plans to broaden out the HBO brand for the combined streamer. That includes the network-style dramas such as the The Pitt and the upcoming How To Survive Without Me, which are designed to appeal to a wide audience and return annually for 15-episode seasons, and Stuart Fails To Save the Universe a spinoff of one of the biggest sitcoms in network history, CBS’ The Big Bang Theory.

While the Discovery content synergy did not work, “I would say a better experiment in terms of broadening out was what we did with The Pitt,” Bloys said. “That show has been so successful not only in the Emmys and not only in its performance but it has actually broadened out people on HBO Max who tend to watch the library movies or library series [and] are consumers of The Pitt, as well as some HBO subscribers. So you successfully broadened it out, and you haven’t radically changed the value proposition.”

There is some overlap in the two streamer’s original slates too. Many of the Paramount+ series greenlights by Holland’s regime, including Discretion, starring Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning, are considered HBO-like shows that would fit on either brand.

The combination of HBO Max and Paramount+ will bring together the entire Big Bang franchise: Stuart, the libraries of the mothership and spinoff Young Sheldon and next-day episodes of fellow spinoff Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, which airs on CBS. And speaking of CBS, Bloys started his career there, and he also worked at HBO Independent Productions during the final stretch of the hit CBS sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, which the unit produced, providing him with some experience in network programming for the masses.

Also, he had been able to successfully expand his purview and expertise. As a comedy executive, he faced initial skepticism whether he could handle drama when he succeeded Michael Lombardo as HBO President of Programming in 2016. After proving himself there, Bloys overcame similar doubts whether he could adapt to streaming when given the reins of HBO Max, now home of hit originals such as The Pitt and successful acquisitions such as Heated Rivalry.