Paramount executives avoid questions from Warner Bros. in the fourth quarter earnings call
Paramount Skydance leaders avoided any discussion about the company’s latest bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery as it unveiled its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings report on Wednesday, which reflected a decline in the company’s core linear TV business but also momentum for Paramount+ and other streaming platforms.
CEO David Ellison and Paramount President Jeff Shell answered questions from Wall Street analysts about the company’s fourth-quarter results, which marks the studio’s first full quarter under Ellison’s ownership.
Ellison said bluntly that Paramount’s 2025 film slate was “underperforming.” Ellison and Shell were pressed about the possibility for the NFL to activate its option to renegotiate its TV rights deals starting in 2029. And Ellison told analysts that he is optimistic about streaming’s ad-supported FAST channel sector, and that Paramount will ultimately invest “10x” in tech talent as part of the studio’s revitalization plan.
READ MORE: Paramount Skydance sees fourth-quarter losses widen amid TV slump
Dennis Cinelli, Paramount’s newly appointed Chief Financial Officer, spoke of the 2026 forecast for Paramount Pictures’ film business as an overall down year compared to 2025, despite more theatrical releases in the pipeline. Paramount said it expects 16 theatrical releases this year, up from eight in 2025.
“We expect actual revenue to decline. Overall, we’ve been very clear that we’re in a real rebuilding phase of that business. As we do that rebuild, we’ll see some of that come through in 2026, but that will be primarily over the next few years. And so even if actual revenue declines, we expect better cost management and benefits from our licensing agreements to increase the studio’s profitability,” Cinelli said.
Ellison’s Skydance Media acquired Paramount Global last August. “We have inherited a film that has underperformed. We will see significant improvement in the profitability of the film series this year,” Ellison said.
Asked for examples of how the new regime is carrying out its plan to use technology upgrades to drive operational improvements at the more than 100-year-old studio, Ellison pointed to changes already made, but indicated that much more is to come.
“If you look at the engineers we currently have at the company, you can expect us to be about 10 times the workforce that we’re actually investing in this,” Ellison said. “We really want to be in a position where we can be an industry leader in terms of how this transformation takes shape.”
Ellison and Shell were asked about growth and profit forecasts for the Paramount+ streamer. Ellison also made a point of endorsing the company’s Pluto TV platform, which offers dozens of free ad-supported streaming television channels (also known as FAST) around the world.
“I’m a big believer in the FAST space. If you look really globally, FAST is something that’s only going to grow in importance. And if you look at the signs that are really encouraging on Pluto as well, is that we’re seeing engagement grow,” Ellison said. “The headwind we’re facing is really monetization, and we’re doing several things to correct that. And while Pluto has always been a leader in FAST — it’s a profitable platform — from our perspective it was underinvested in by the previous owners and managers, both from a content perspective and from a product perspective.”
As for the NFL, Shell projected confidence that Paramount’s CBS would remain a cornerstone of the league’s game distribution strategy for many years to come. The NFL has the right to renegotiate deals made in 2021 that extend through 2033. Shell pointed to the power of the regionalization that CBS allows with Sunday NFL coverage with its AFC package, just as Fox does with its NFC Sunday package. If the NFL restarts the contract, the price is expected to be astronomical.
“We feel quite confident that we will be doing business with the NFL for a long time to come, and we have carefully considered the expected impact of those negotiations in our internal projections going forward. “One of the unique things about our relationship with the NFL, and I would actually say it’s probably somewhere in Fox’s relationship with the NFL, is the anchor of their flywheel and the anchor of their reach is actually the reach of both CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoons. That reach, which has truly contributed to our mutual benefit to the NFL’s success, is due to our vast roster of both owned and operated stations, of which we have 28, and affiliates. It’s important that those games are regionalized, and that we aggregate that viewership and maximize the viewership in each market for the best game, both for us and Fox, and that benefits the NFL and us and really maximizes reach on any given Sunday.
