There is a standard division of labor in Hollywood: one person gets to stand on stage next to movie stars, and another person gets to cancel the movie stars’ projects. At the company formerly known as Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery — now a Skydance production — those two people are now formally two different people. David Ellison, who assembled the empire with his father Larry’s money, keeps the job title “CEO,” no “co-“ about it. And Ynon Kreiz, freshly imported from Mattel, becomes co-CEO, a title that in practice means: he gets the other job.
As Peter Kafka reported at Business Insider, Kreiz is expected to co-host a press event with Ellison on Tuesday night, and then get to work finding $6 billion in savings over three years. That is the actual job. It is not a secret job. It will, reportedly, involve meaningful layoffs, because $6 billion is the kind of number that does not come out of renegotiating the office coffee contract.
Kreiz’s résumé is oddly perfect for this in two directions at once. At Mattel he is known for exactly two things, and they are the two halves of the Skydance job description. First, he engineered the deal with Warner Bros. and Margot Robbie that produced the Barbie movie, a colossal hit — proof he understands how intellectual property becomes money. Second, he laid off 22% of the toymaker’s workforce in one go — proof he understands how money stops leaving the building. Before that he ran Endemol, the Dutch TV production powerhouse, and he took Maker Studios, a web-video startup popular with young YouTubers, and scaled it into something Disney paid $500 million for in 2014. He also led Mattel’s push into IP licensing, which is how we got this year’s Masters of the Universe movie.
At Skydance, though, nobody expects him to do deals with studios or talent. That is Ellison’s side of the house — the schmoozing side. Kreiz gets the P&L side. One of Kreiz’s friends offered a one-word job description:
He’s Gunnar
That would be Gunnar Wiedenfels, the former WBD chief financial officer, who became famous in a narrow circle for hacking away at that company’s costs — layoffs, yes, but also the more exotic maneuvers, like mothballing finished TV shows and movies so they could be written off. The interesting thing about Wiedenfels is that almost nobody outside the company knew who he was. The public’s attention, and its ire, went to David Zaslav, the spotlight-loving CEO. The guy doing the cutting stayed anonymous; the guy enjoying the spotlight absorbed the blame. Skydance appears to have noticed this arrangement and institutionalized it: Ellison gets the spotlight, Kreiz gets the ax, and everyone’s incentives are… legible, anyway.
People who have dealt with Kreiz describe a man built for this. Kevin Mayer, the Candle Media co-CEO, negotiated against him back when Mayer was a top Disney executive and Kreiz was selling Maker Studios. “He’s very serious,” Mayer says. “He’s unflappable, and is willing to take on the heaviest of heavy lifts.” Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures, Maker’s primary investor, describes an exceptionally high-energy executive: “Ynon will get on an airplane and fly across the country for a meeting if it’s critical, and fly back the next morning.” And Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl, who has known Kreiz for decades, offers a character reference that is genuinely hard to top: Kreiz and his wife are the first names in Kyncl’s emergency file, the people Kyncl’s kids are supposed to call if something happens to their parents. “Ynon’s not a teddy bear. But he’s a warm person,” Kyncl says. Which is maybe the ideal temperament for eliminating thousands of jobs: unflappable in the meeting, warm in the emergency file.
There are demerits. Disney never figured out what to do with Maker after buying it, and Kreiz left a couple of years later. And the Mattel story has a sobering epilogue: Barbie sales shot up after the movie’s blockbuster 2023 run, then fell for two years and drifted back to pre-movie levels, while Mattel’s stock has been listing for some time. Cutting costs, it turns out, is a skill that travels; making revenue grow is a different one. Skydance is hiring for the first skill. It has made that pretty clear.
Now, the mechanism. Why does this company need $6 billion of savings if there’s no angry shareholder base to appease? Because there isn’t one — the two Ellisons have effective control of the whole company, so Kreiz will be spared the quarterly earnings-call ritual that tormented Zaslav. But the equity being locked up in a family doesn’t make the debt go away. The combined company carries a staggering $80 billion of it, and bondholders are a less sentimental constituency than shareholders. Shareholders can be charmed on a call. Bondholders read covenants. And, per the reporting, those bondholders may already be worried about Skydance’s prospects — which is why the man whose job is to make the numbers work just got made co-CEO. Skydance declined to comment; Kreiz declined to comment.
So the structure is: one CEO who owns the company and gets the fun, and one co-CEO who answers to the debt and gets the layoffs. For this, Kreiz will be paid $47.5 million in his first year. That sounds like a lot until you do the division: it is about 0.8% of the savings he’s meant to find, and about 0.06% of the debt hanging over the place. In Hollywood terms, he’s not the star of the picture. He’s the guy who has to tell everyone else there’s no budget. They pay that guy well, because nobody else wants the part.
Anyway. The last time someone played this role at this company, he got to stay anonymous while the famous CEO took the heat. Kreiz’s title is bigger than Wiedenfels’s was. So is the number.