Batman and Mission: Impossible Have the Same Owner as of Today. Here Is What the Paramount and Warner Bros. Merger Means for the Movies.

Tom Cruise's last four movies before this fall all belonged to Paramount: three Mission: Impossible sequels and Top Gun: Maverick. Then he stepped out to make one for Warner Bros. Over the weekend, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger opened in fifth place with $8 million, Cruise's lowest US opening in 19 years, against a reported budget of at least $125 million.

Two days later, the question of whose movie it was gets complicated. Paramount's roughly $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery is set to close today, October 6, and the combined company takes the name Skydance, after the production company its CEO, David Ellison, founded. The Paramount mountain and the Warner Bros. shield stay on screen as separate studio brands. Behind them, Batman, Harry Potter, Ethan Hunt, Middle-earth, Starfleet, and the Corleones now answer to one owner.

Here is what changes for people who buy movie tickets, and what does not.

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Five DC films, head-to-head. Tap the one you prefer and we will build your order, then label it S through D.

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The Batman2022

VS

The Dark Knight2008

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Who runs the movies now

Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, who already run Paramount Pictures, become co-chairs of a Motion Picture Group that oversees both Paramount and Warner Bros. Pictures. Warner's film chiefs, Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, are not making the move.

That is a remarkable exit. De Luca and Abdy took over Warner's film division in 2022, and this year the studio went into the Oscars with an industry-leading 30 nominations and came out with 11 wins, including Best Picture for Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. The rest of 2026 was harder. The Bride! underperformed, and Digger opened the same week their exit was reported.

One corner of Warner is untouched. James Gunn and Peter Safran stay on as co-chairs of DC Studios, so the DC Universe plan rolls on: Clayface, an R-rated body horror movie, opens October 23, and Man of Tomorrow follows on July 9, 2027. Where those land against Superman and Supergirl is a fight for our DC movies ranked list.

The one wobble came this week. Production on Matt Reeves's The Batman Part II paused while Reeves deals with a family matter. DC Studios called the break temporary, and the film is still dated for February 18, 2028. Until then, our Batman movies ranked list has the full run.

On the streaming side, HBO's Casey Bloys becomes co-chair and chief content officer for streaming. Ellison has said he wants to fold HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single service with more than 200 million subscribers. No name, price, or launch date has been announced.

The promise it made to theaters

Twelve state attorneys general, led by California, sued to stop the deal, and the settlement a federal judge approved on September 30 is the most useful part of this story for anyone who likes seeing movies in a theater. For five years, Skydance has agreed to:

• Release at least 30 movies a year in theaters, 20 of them wide, for the first two years, then 32 a year, 21 of them wide, for the next three.
• Release at least four independent films a year.
• Keep its wide releases exclusive to theaters for 45 days.
• Keep those films off subscription streaming, its own HBO Max and Paramount+ included, for 90 days after they open.
• Spend an extra $1.5 billion on US production over the five years.
• Pay $30 million for every film it falls short, with a forced sale of Miramax also on the table.

Those are real numbers. Supergirl reached HBO Max on September 10, 76 days after it opened, as we noted in our review. Under these terms it would have waited two more weeks. And nobody should mistake the deal for a blessing: California Attorney General Rob Bonta said outright that the settlement "is not a vote of support for this merger."

Warner already learned what a window is worth

If a 90-day rule sounds fussy, remember the last time Warner Bros. treated theaters as optional. In December 2020 it announced that its entire 2021 slate would premiere on HBO Max the same day it opened in theaters, and Christopher Nolan, a Warner director since 2002, went public.

Some of our industry's biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.Christopher Nolan, The Hollywood Reporter, December 2020

He took Oppenheimer to Universal, then The Odyssey, and the two have grossed more than $2.5 billion worldwide between them. Our Christopher Nolan movies ranked list covers the whole run.

One footnote: these two studios have shared a Nolan film before. In 2013, Warner Bros. gave up its stake in future Friday the 13th and South Park movies to buy into Paramount's Interstellar, which Paramount released in North America and Warner everywhere else. As of today, the two studios that split it are one company.

One owner, a lot of franchises

Put the two libraries side by side and the overlap is hard to take in.

• From Warner Bros.: DC, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Conjuring, The Matrix, Mad Max, Minecraft, and Denis Villeneuve's Dune, made with Legendary.
• From Paramount: Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Star Trek, Transformers, Sonic the Hedgehog, A Quiet Place, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Godfather, and the last three Scream movies.

The new calendar, and its first crowded summer

The first test of the combined slate comes in ten days. Paramount opens Street Fighter on October 16, and Warner Bros. follows with Clayface a week later and Dune: Part Three on December 18.

Next summer is where it gets interesting. One company now holds four big dates in five weeks:

• Man of Tomorrow (DC Studios and Warner Bros.): July 9, 2027
• A Minecraft Movie Squared (Warner Bros.): July 23, 2027
• A Quiet Place Part III (Paramount): July 30, 2027
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem 2 (Paramount): August 13, 2027

Studios that spent a century scheduling against each other now have to schedule against themselves. Whether all four keep those dates will be one of the first calls the new film team makes.

What to watch for

• In theaters: nothing moves today. Every date in this piece stands as of October 6.
• At home: HBO Max and Paramount+ are still two apps. Watch for a name, a price, and whether one of them goes away.
• Batman: whether Reeves's pause moves February 18, 2028.

Put them head to head on Shortlist, then build a movie tier list of the whole new Skydance shelf and see which studio wins.

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