As the industry continued to speculate about whether the HBO boss or Paramount’s Cindy Holland would wind up with control of the two companies’ soon-to-be-merged streaming behemoth, in recent weeks the momentum seemed to be on Bloys’ side. So when Paramount direct-to-consumer chair Holland told colleagues Tuesday that she would be leaving, her staff at the company was disappointed — having seen firsthand the exec’s tremendous impact inside the company over the past year — but not surprised. Bloys had recently become a bit bullish on the merger.
As he made the rounds last month during Emmys weekend, the chairman of HBO and HBO Max content wasn’t shy in sharing his hope that Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery would soon come together. That’s because the alternative, he told industry folk, might be more dire.
The uncertainty of a deal, which at that point was still facing a lawsuit from California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other state AGs, was having a negative impact on business, and it needed to be resolved, Bloys said. But his pro-deal sentiment was a bit of a break from the hope inside other Warner Bros. segments that the merger might not happen. Industry insiders who spent time with Bloys over cocktails and canapés that weekend read his eagerness for the deal to be consummated as a sign that the exec was feeling good about his future — or, at least, HBO’s stature inside a merged Paramount-Warner Bros.
It was no secret that Bloys wouldn’t accept anything less than reporting to the combined company’s boss, David Ellison, and his domain would have to (at the very least) include everything that he oversees right now at Warner Bros. The idea that Bloys would accept just running the HBO fiefdom — in the vein of John Landgraf’s FX purview at Disney — was a nonstarter, as Bloys’ role had long since expanded to all of the direct-to-consumer world, and such a move would have been seen by Bloys as a step back. But that meant Ellison faced a Sophie’s choice.
Ellison had made it clear that he eventually wanted to merge HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single entity, but the CEO quickly learned neither Bloys nor Holland could be expected to report to the other in a new corporate structure. Ellison could have kicked the can down the road, as HBO Max and Paramount+ will continue to operate as separate services for consumers in the near future — given that there are different revenue streams attached to distribution deals. Both are also profitable, which means it doesn’t make sense to immediately shut one of them down and subsume it into the other one.
Most immediately, HBO Max and Paramount+ can probably start being sold as a bundle, but combining the two organizations will take time (observers point to how long Disney has taken to combine Disney+ and Hulu). Even so, it seemed very unlikely that the new company could launch with both Bloys and Holland still in charge of their respective domains. Not only would that pit the two streamers against each other internally, but a bake-off would cause huge internal distractions at a time when the company needs to focus on integrating operations.
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