Wikipedia Deep Dive

Paramount Global

10 min read

In August 2025, one of America's oldest media empires quietly ceased to exist. Paramount Global—the company behind everything from SpongeBob SquarePants to 60 Minutes, from Top Gun to The Daily Show—merged into a new entity after years of corporate musical chairs that reads like a soap opera written by investment bankers.

But here's the strange part: this wasn't really a death. It was more like the latest chapter in a corporate identity crisis that's been going on for over a century.

The Tangled Family Tree

To understand Paramount Global, you need to understand that modern media companies aren't really "companies" in the traditional sense. They're more like living organisms that consume each other, split apart, and recombine in ways that would make biologists uncomfortable.

Let's start at the beginning. Paramount Pictures was founded in 1912 as the Famous Players Film Company—back when movies were a novelty and Hollywood was mostly orange groves. The Columbia Broadcasting System, better known as CBS, came along in 1927. These two giants crossed paths almost immediately: Paramount Pictures owned nearly half of CBS from 1929 to 1932, back when radio was king and television was science fiction.

Then they went their separate ways. For decades.

In 1952, CBS created a small division called CBS Television Film Sales. Its job was simple: sell reruns of CBS shows to local stations. This was unglamorous work—the television equivalent of selling yesterday's bread. The division changed names several times: CBS Films, then CBS Enterprises, and finally, in 1970, they landed on Viacom. The name was an acronym for "Video and Audio Communications," which tells you everything you need to know about how exciting the branding meetings were.

Here's where things get interesting. In 1971, the Federal Communications Commission, commonly known as the FCC, decided that television networks shouldn't be allowed to own their own syndication companies. The logic was that it concentrated too much power: if you both made the shows and controlled their afterlife in reruns, you had an unfair advantage. So CBS had to spin off Viacom as an independent company.

Viacom was now on its own. And it got ambitious.

The Rise of Viacom

In 1986, Viacom made a purchase that would define its identity for decades. It acquired MTV Networks and Showtime from Warner Communications and American Express. Suddenly, this former syndication house owned the channel that defined youth culture—the same MTV that launched Michael Jackson into the stratosphere and gave the world music videos as we know them.

A year later, in 1987, a company called National Amusements bought Viacom. National Amusements was (and remains) a movie theater chain controlled by the Redstone family. Sumner Redstone, the patriarch, was a Harvard-educated lawyer who had survived a hotel fire in 1979 by clinging to a window ledge while flames burned his hand so badly he nearly lost it. He was not a man who gave up easily.

Under Redstone's control, Viacom went on a buying spree. The crown jewel came in 1994: Viacom purchased Paramount Communications, the renamed parent company of Paramount Pictures. Remember, Gulf and Western Industries had bought Paramount Pictures back in 1966, then rebranded itself as Paramount Communications in 1989. Now Viacom—the little syndication division that CBS had been forced to spin off—owned one of Hollywood's legendary studios.

But Sumner Redstone wasn't done.

The Reunion Nobody Saw Coming

In 1999, Viacom announced something almost absurd: it was going to buy CBS.

Think about that for a moment. CBS had created Viacom as a small internal division. CBS had spun off Viacom because regulators forced it to. And now, three decades later, the child was swallowing the parent. It was as if your appendix had grown into a separate organism, left home, gotten rich, and come back to purchase your entire body.

The CBS that Viacom was buying wasn't quite the same CBS from 1970, though. In 1995, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation—yes, the company famous for refrigerators and nuclear reactors—had bought CBS and eventually renamed itself CBS Corporation. So when Viacom's deal closed in 2000, it was technically reuniting CBS with its former syndication arm, but through the strangest possible route.

The combined company was enormous. It owned Paramount Pictures, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Showtime, and dozens of other properties. Sumner Redstone controlled it all through National Amusements.

It lasted five years.

The Split and the Long Road Back

On December 31, 2005, the company split in two. One half became a new CBS Corporation, keeping the broadcast network, television stations, and the Showtime cable channel. The other half became a new Viacom, taking MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and Paramount Pictures.

Why split? The official reasoning involved "unlocking shareholder value" and letting each company focus on its strengths. The unofficial reasoning was that the pieces were worth more apart than together—or at least, that's what Wall Street believed at the time.

Both companies remained under National Amusements' control. Sumner Redstone sat atop both empires like a feudal lord with two kingdoms. But as he aged and his health declined, his daughter Shari Redstone increasingly took the reins. And she had different ideas.

By 2016, Shari Redstone was pushing for the two companies to merge back together. The media landscape had changed dramatically. Netflix had transformed from a DVD-by-mail service into a streaming giant. Amazon was producing prestige television. Traditional cable subscribers were "cutting the cord" in droves. Standing alone, neither CBS Corporation nor Viacom seemed equipped to compete.

But the CBS Corporation leadership didn't want to merge. Les Moonves, the long-time chairman and chief executive officer of CBS, was particularly opposed. He reportedly called Viacom's cable channels an "albatross"—a burden that would drag down CBS rather than strengthen it. He suggested that CBS would be better off buying other companies, like the movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or even Sony Pictures.

In May 2018, CBS Corporation took the extraordinary step of suing its own parent company. The lawsuit accused Shari Redstone of abusing her voting power and forcing a merger that neither CBS nor Viacom actually wanted. It was a family feud playing out in Delaware's Court of Chancery.

The Moonves Collapse

Then everything changed.

In September 2018, Les Moonves resigned from CBS following multiple accusations of sexual assault. The #MeToo movement, which had begun with revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, had claimed one of television's most powerful executives.

With Moonves gone, the main obstacle to the merger vanished. As part of his departure settlement, National Amusements agreed not to propose a merger for at least two years. But once that waiting period passed, the path was clear.

In August 2019, CBS and Viacom announced they would merge. The combined company would be called ViacomCBS—an uninspired name that sounded like it was generated by a committee, probably because it was. Bob Bakish, who had been running Viacom, would lead the new entity. Shari Redstone would serve as chair.

The deal closed on December 4, 2019. After fourteen years apart, the family was reunited.

The Paramount Rebrand

ViacomCBS spent its first years doing what merged companies always do: reorganizing, selling off assets, and trying to figure out its streaming strategy. It sold the CNET technology websites for $500 million. It tried to sell the book publisher Simon & Schuster for over $2 billion to Penguin Random House, but a federal judge blocked that deal on antitrust grounds. Eventually, it sold Simon & Schuster to the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts—commonly known by its initials, KKR—for $1.6 billion.

In February 2022, the company made a symbolic change: it renamed itself Paramount Global. The ViacomCBS name was awkward and backward-looking. Paramount, by contrast, was one of the most recognizable brands in entertainment history. The famous mountain logo, which has appeared before movies since 1914, represented something everyone understood: Hollywood glamour, storytelling, dreams projected onto screens.

The company traded under the name "Paramount" and took the paramount.com web address. Paramount Pictures itself had to move to paramountpictures.com—the child had fully consumed the parent's identity.

The Empire at Its Peak

At its height, Paramount Global was staggeringly large. It operated over 170 networks reaching approximately 700 million subscribers in 180 countries. Its properties included:

Paramount Pictures, one of Hollywood's "Big Five" studios
The CBS television network, home of football, 60 Minutes, and the most-watched evening news broadcast in America
MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and the Paramount Network
Showtime, the premium cable channel known for Dexter and Homeland
BET, the Black Entertainment Television network and its sister channels
Paramount+, the streaming service competing against Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max
Pluto TV, a free streaming service supported by advertising
International networks including Channel 5 in the United Kingdom, Network 10 in Australia, Telefe in Argentina, and Chilevisión in Chile

The company also held a 12.5% stake in The CW, the broadcast network it had co-founded with Warner Bros. back when both companies were trying to compete with Fox for younger viewers. In 2022, the Nexstar Media Group—America's largest local television station owner—bought 75% of The CW, leaving Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery with smaller shares.

The Final Act

Despite its size, Paramount Global struggled. The streaming wars required billions in content spending. Cable subscriber losses accelerated. The company's stock price declined precipitously from its pandemic-era highs.

By 2024, Paramount was in play. Warner Bros. Discovery, itself the product of a massive merger, held preliminary talks about combining with Paramount. Those talks went nowhere. Sony Pictures and the private equity firm Apollo Global Management considered a joint acquisition. That didn't happen either.

The winning bidder was Skydance Media, a production company founded by David Ellison—son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. Skydance had produced several Paramount films, including the revitalized Mission: Impossible franchise and Top Gun: Maverick, one of the most successful films in Paramount's history.

The deal was complicated. It nearly fell apart in June 2024, then was revived in July. When finally approved in July 2025, it created a new company called Paramount Skydance Corporation through a three-way merger between Skydance, National Amusements, and Paramount Global.

On August 7, 2025, the merger closed. Paramount Global ceased to exist as an independent company after less than six years under that name—and nearly 113 years since Paramount Pictures was founded.

The Bigger Picture

The story of Paramount Global is really the story of American media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It's a story of consolidation and fragmentation, of empires built and empires dismantled, of technology constantly reshaping what's possible and what's profitable.

Consider the journey: A syndication division becomes an independent company. That company buys MTV and defines youth culture for a generation. It acquires a legendary movie studio. It purchases its former parent. It splits apart. It reunites. It rebrands. And finally, it merges with a production company run by a tech billionaire's son.

Each step made sense to someone at the time. Each transaction had its logic, its advocates, its projected synergies. And yet the whole arc has a quality of barely controlled chaos, of executives and investors constantly rearranging deck chairs while the entertainment industry itself transforms beneath them.

The Redstone family controlled this empire for nearly four decades, from Sumner's 1987 acquisition of Viacom through Shari's oversight of the Skydance merger. That continuity of ownership persisted even as the company's structure, name, and strategy shifted repeatedly. National Amusements—still primarily a movie theater chain—remained the controlling shareholder through every twist and turn.

What comes next is anyone's guess. The new Paramount Skydance Corporation faces the same challenges that bedeviled Paramount Global: streaming economics that burn cash, cord-cutting that erodes traditional revenue, and competition from tech giants with effectively unlimited resources. But it also inherits one of the most valuable content libraries in existence, from silent films to Star Trek, from I Love Lucy to South Park.

Stories, it turns out, are remarkably durable. The companies that own them are considerably less so.