The classic problem with a 40-something mogul spending roughly $118 billion to buy two of the biggest media companies in the world is that, at some point, he has to actually run them. David Ellison, son of billionaire Larry Ellison, has spent two years assembling an empire: by August 2025 he had closed a deal worth around $8 billion to buy Paramount, and roughly a month later he was off chasing Warner Bros. Discovery, kicking off a bidding war that ended in a deal worth roughly $110 billion on an enterprise basis. The combined company — Paramount’s and Warner Bros.’ film studios, CBS, CNN, TNT, MTV, BET, Paramount+ and HBO Max — will be named simply Skydance, and the merger closes on Tuesday. Not even 18 months ago, Ellison ran a production company whose signature assets were the Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible films and Top Gun: Maverick. The question that has hung over the whole spree, as CNBC puts it, is that the tech executive can clearly buy it, but can he lead it?
Ellison’s answer is, essentially: no, but I’ve found a guy. Ynon Kreiz, the outgoing chief executive of Mattel, joins Paramount Skydance on Monday and becomes co-CEO of the combined company upon closing on Tuesday. In the company’s own division of labor, Ellison will handle “long-term strategy, creative vision, technology and capital allocation,” while Kreiz takes “day-to-day management and the integration of the combined businesses.”
You will notice something about that split. One of those jobs is the fun job — strategy, vision, technology, deciding where the money goes. The other is running an enormous, indebted, balkanized media conglomerate and firing people until the spreadsheets balance. Morningstar senior equity analyst Matthew Dolgin, in a research note this week, said the quiet part plainly: “He undoubtedly is an experienced hand who fills a void that had been present, leaving the firm better positioned with him, in our view, than it was without him. Though his title is co-CEO, we view Kreiz as a chief operating officer.” Dolgin added that he doesn’t necessarily think Kreiz “is the best conceivable choice” for the task, which is a warm endorsement by sell-side standards but a lukewarm one by any other.
Others are more enthusiastic. “It’s an excellent choice for Paramount,” Eric Handler of Roth Capital Partners told CNBC, and Citizens Bank analyst Matthew Condon wrote that Kreiz’s operating experience and brand focus “uniquely position him to help lead the integration of Paramount Skydance and WBD and build the combined business into a best-in-class content and IP platform.” Condon noted the integration is “largely predicated on high expense synergies,” which is analyst language for: there will be cuts, lots of them, and cutting is the thing Kreiz is known for.
The Mattel audition
Here is the résumé. Kreiz is a 30-year media veteran: he co-founded Fox Kids Europe (acquired by Disney in 2002), ran Endemol Group so it became one of the world’s biggest independent TV producers, and was chairman and CEO of Maker Studios, sold to Disney in 2014. In 2018 he became Mattel’s fourth CEO in four years, inheriting a company whose Fisher-Price, Barbie and American Girl brands were adrift and which was still reeling from the Toys R Us bankruptcy. “Mattel had like a four-year revenue downturn, gone from being quite profitable to losing money, and he turned that around in like two years,” Handler said.
The method was not subtle. “They eliminated a lot of SKUs, rationalized the business lines ... They did a great job of cutting like $1 billion worth of cost right out of the gate,” said Gerrick Johnson of Seaport Research Partners. Kreiz restructured the supply chain, made fewer toys, closed factories and cut 2,200 jobs, while prioritizing free cash flow and paying down debt. Now hold that playbook up against the new assignment: Paramount Skydance has promised $6 billion in cost savings within three years of closing, against a pile of around $79 billion in debt. Needham’s Laura Martin expects the integration to take two to three years, and wrote that “over time, we expect cost synergies to be higher than the $6 billion promised.” Where exactly the savings come from is so far unannounced; Paramount executives have said most of the target will be found in “nonlabor” costs, which is at least what companies say before they announce the labor costs.
The other thing Kreiz is known for is Barbie. Early in his tenure he launched an in-house film division at Mattel, on the theory that the box office would sell toys, and partnered with the Warner Bros. studio on the Greta Gerwig film, which made more than $1.4 billion worldwide in 2023. The lesson analysts took from that triumph, though, is a slightly awkward one for both of Kreiz’s employers, old and new. Most of the film’s money went to Warner Bros. and the theaters; Mattel reported a $150 million revenue bump for the year. “But for Mattel, it didn’t translate to the bottom line,” Johnson said. “Mattel that year generated an incremental $90 million in operating profit, so that’s like 13% growth on a consolidated basis with the ‘Barbie’ movie. Barbie revenue was up 3% that year, but Barbie revenue since is down 22%. ... So, a massive deterioration of that Barbie brand since.”
One way to read this: Kreiz built a machine for making hits in which someone else collected most of the revenue, and has now taken a job where he is someone else. He will co-own the studio that keeps the Barbie-type money. Imagine being the executive who negotiated against Warner Bros. on behalf of a toy company, and then being handed Warner Bros. It’s a neat solution to the incentive problem, assuming you think there was an incentive problem.
The bear case is that the eye wandered. Johnson argues that after the film push, “the top line has flatlined. Margin growth has stalled. Innovation has stalled, and it just seems like a classic, you know, taking the eye off the ball.” Morningstar’s Jaime Katz noted this week that Mattel’s stock did a “round trip” under Kreiz — roughly doubling into the mid-$20s, then falling back to around $15 — and wrote that his strategy of making Mattel “an IP-driven, high-performing toy company has largely fallen flat.”
So Skydance gets a chief executive — sorry, co-CEO — whose record contains both of the things the merger needs most: demonstrated skill at extracting costs from a sprawling consumer business, and a demonstrated willingness to prioritize building entertainment franchises out of intellectual property. It also gets the open question of whether those two things can coexist in one company, or in one C-suite. Two CEOs, two film studios, two streaming services, $79 billion of debt and a promise to Wall Street that the expensive parts will somehow add up to less than the sum of their parts.
The last toy company boss who ran a media giant’s cost-cutting from inside a co-CEO title doesn’t exist, so there’s no template. There’s just a man who cut $1 billion out of Mattel “right out of the gate” being handed $6 billion to find at Paramount, with the biggest brand-builder credit in Hollywood already on his shelf. Whether that shelf is at Paramount or Warner Bros. is, for now, one of the questions he’ll be paid to answer.