Can Skydance and Warner Bros. both survive?

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Today, I’m talking with Peter Kafka, chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of the Channels podcast, about the gigantic Warner Bros.-Paramount merger and the future of the company now simply called Skydance.

Skydance is owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed the day Peter and I spoke.

There are some grand ambitions here, but the reality is that acquiring Warner never goes well for anyone. AOL failed, AT&T failed, and Discovery failed — although it did succeed in flipping these assets to Skydance. So I wanted to ask Peter if he thinks the Ellisons and Skydance have a real shot at succeeding where so many companies before them have hit the rocks.

Peter Kafka, you’re the chief correspondent at Business Insider, and you’re the host of the Channels podcast, our sister podcast here on the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome back to Decoder.

A big media day. It’s an auspicious day, as my parents would say. It is the day that the Warner-Paramount merger closes. We’ve all been calling it Warner Mount, but I’m told this company will instead just be called Skydance.

Every time I see the word Skydance, I assume it is foreign-owned, which is maybe true in some way.

Another way to think of it is that there are iconic names in Hollywood. Paramount is such an iconic name that Viacom turned itself into Paramount years ago. Warner Bros. is a legendary studio. Let’s get rid of those names. Let’s add Skydance, which no one’s ever heard of.