HBO Max and Paramount+ will be combined into one streaming app

We’ve all heard about the impending sale of Warner Bros. Discovery to David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance. Well, ICYMI, it finally went through. The $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed on Tuesday, October 6, creating a new media giant called—wait for it—Skydance. (Yes, it does sound like a bad James Bond movie.) 

But what does it actually mean for us?

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Not much right now, but in the near future, it will mean the merging of HBO Max and Paramount+. Ellison said that the long term plan is to bring HBO Max and Paramount+ together as one singular streaming service following Skydance’s completion of its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery

“Given the way AI technology and other things have progressed, we think we can actually accelerate how quickly we accomplish that goal,” he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

There are a lot of questions about how a merged platform would work: what would happen to each service’s catalogue? How would it be structured? What would it be called? 

It’ll be some time before any of it happens, but we should be on the look out for bundling options between the two services. As we’ve covered before, competitor services like Prime Video already offer tons of bundling options, so this is a pretty common practice.

Bringing HBO Max and Paramount+ together will mean a total of roughly 200 million subscribers and a massive content collection of hits like Paramount+’s Yellowstone, MobLand, Tulsa King and HBO Max’s The Pitt, Hacks, House of the Dragon and so much more. 

Ellison said the purchase by Paramount Skydance (now just Skydance Corp.) will allow the company to “compete with the Disneys and Netflixes and Amazons and anybody in the world.” 

Of course, the move is being heavily criticized because it means fewer big players with way more power—and less competition in theatrical film distribution and cable television. Critics also worry that Ellison, a friend of President Trump, now owns both CNN and CBS. The sale only closed after a settlement with state attorneys general added safeguards on films, jobs and newsroom independence.

So for now, keep an eye out for the ability to bundle your HBO Max with your Paramount+ in hopefully what will be a more affordable price than what they currently cost: $18.49 and $13.99 a month respectively for their ad-free versions.