The Warner Bros. Franchises Paramount Could Revitalise Post-Merger

The hierarchy of power in the cinematic landscape is about to change as two titans of the industry join forces, for better or worse.

We all knew this was coming for months, but Paramount’s confirmed $110b takeover of Warner Bros. has once again sent shockwaves through the industry.

Founded over a century ago by Jack Warner and his three brothers, the studio’s early decades were synonymous with gangster movies and hard-boiled stars like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, a tradition that carried on (however spiritually) through everything from Dirty Harry, Blade Runner, and GoodFellas, to The Matrix and The Dark Knight. Of course, over the last 50 years, that purview was expanded significantly and the legendary WB emblem is now just as well known for delivering some of the most beloved family blockbusters of all time. 

With Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the DCU, and Dune all currently ticking away, however, it’s unlikely that the merger will affect much on those fronts, at least for the foreseeable future. The more interesting franchises, with regards to the next few years, are the ones with untapped potential. Let’s look a little closer at the treasures in the WB vault that Paramount could harness.

What the Warner Bros. and Paramount Merger Means, in a Nutshell

Naturally, we will have to wait a few years before a proper picture forms of what this merger means for the two studios involved and the industry at large, but for now we can at least confirm that a) the company will collectively be called Skydance, b) as with any merger of this scale, a lot of people will probably lose their jobs, and c) there is already an eager room full of creative executives who are looking to blow the dust off some dormant Warner Brothers IP.

Like any Hollywood deal of this magnitude in the last 15 years, this one is all to do with content — the basic streaming equation of who can provide their subscribers with the most stuff. In the last few years, however, Warner Bros. have once again positioned themselves as the great champions of original big screen movies, with everything from Barbie and Sinners to Weapons and One Battle After Another, confirming a continued belief in auteur filmmaking.

The question now is whether any of that will continue going forward (especially after Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy stepped down) or if Skydance will pivot away from these kinds of big swings (the whole Digger situation really couldn’t have come at a worse time) and embrace more trusted IP. 

Dormant Franchises Paramount Could Help to Revive

With new installments in the Transformers, Barbie and Top Gun franchises already in the works, along with the new prequel series Crystal Lake from the Friday the 13th universe, there are already plenty of cogs moving in the WB-Paramount IP machine, but we can certainly point towards a few corners of their business that’ve sat untouched for a little too long. 

Looking over the most famous properties in that stable, one that feels ripe for the reimagining is The Matrix — a franchise with a fully realised world and seemingly endless possibilities (just consider the history of the Matrix itself and all those ideas we saw explored in The Animatrix). The tricky thing here is to imagine a Matrix movie without Lana and Lily Wachowski’s involvement. We’ve also only seen one Matrix movie in the last 23 years and, however conceptually interesting Resurrections might have been, it wasn’t anyone’s idea of a satisfying blockbuster. On the other hand, in 2024 it was announced that Drew Goddard (screenwriter of Project Hail Mary) was penning a fifth instalment, although we haven’t heard much about that since. Watch this space.

Another big name at Paramount who might currently be eyeing up this new box of toys is Taylor Sheridan. The seemingly tireless Yellowstone creator is currently working on a Call of Duty movie, which would be his first foray into big name IP. Is it so strange to imagine that he would be tempted by the moody, vigilante-strewn world of DC or the post apocalyptic landscapes of Mad Max? As Landman recently showed, Sheridan certainly knows his way around the oil-obsessed mind. 

Another tasty property is The Looney Tunes: a gang of iconic characters that have been providing a slightly more slapstick and slightly more mature alternative to their colleagues at the House of Mouse since 1930, yet have rarely been tapped to their full potential on the big screen. With their 100th birthday on the horizon, the timing would make all kinds of sense. 

The big plus points on the Looney Tunes CV are the live-action/animation hybrid movies, which have so far given us the all time classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the perfectly memorable Space Jam, the underrated Looney Tunes: Back in Action and this year’s frankly delightful Coyote vs. Acme — a movie that would’ve killed even without the bizarre, meta-textual backstory of how the studio almost shelved it indefinitely. 

For all of Coyote vs. Acme’s charms, however, it did feel weirdly like I (a person in their late 30s) was the target audience. For this crop of classic characters to really come back into the fold, Skydance will need to find a way to introduce a new generation to them. Let’s just hope that it’s something other than a football version of Space Jam starring Lamine Yamal and IShowSpeed. 

Crossovers We Could See Between WB and Paramount

Keeping things in cartoon land, WB absorbed Hanna-Barbera animations back in 2001 thanks to another merger but haven’t done much with the IP since William Hanna and Joseph Barbera died in the early ‘00s. At time of writing, Scooby Doo: Origins is on its way to Netflix and a live-action reboot of The Jetsons is already in the works with Jim Carrey on board to star. In that vein, might there be an opportunity to bring those big names together back at Skydance along with a new Flintstones, say, or Powerpuff Girls perhaps?  

The Flintstones actually met the Jetsons once before, just as the Addams Family and Batman and Robin used to guest star on Scooby-doo (albeit all in the 2D days), so there’s plenty of precedent for bizarro crossover potential here — and who wouldn’t want to see McKenna Grace’s Daphne go toe-to-toe with Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday in the not so distant future?

Speaking of the not so distant future: it’s odd to think, but we haven’t seen a Star Trek movie in over a decade, and while six separate TV shows have been launched in that time, there’s always an appetite out there to "boldly go where no man has gone before” on the big screen. Is it too late for Patrick Stewart’s Picard to make an appearance in the Chris Pine universe, just a Leonard Nimoy did in 2009's Star Trek reboot? I would definitely buy a ticket.