Every streaming consolidation reaches the point where boardroom logic has to become something a subscriber can buy. For HBO Max and Paramount+, now two services under one owner, that point finally has a launch window attached, if not yet a price. David Ellison, chief executive of Skydance, the company formed when Paramount absorbed Warner Bros. Discovery, has said from the start that the destination is one service. What he had not said was when the first step would arrive.

That step is a bundle. On a call with Wall Street analysts he called it “our first step towards unifying the two services,” and said consumers “will be delighted” by a package spanning entertainment, news and sports, with marquee titles such as Harry Potter, The Pitt, Mayor of Kingstown and Landman. As Deadline reported, the timing surfaced in his letter to shareholders, released alongside Skydance’s first quarterly results as a merged company.

The bundle will launch in early 2027. Pricing is still undecided: Ellison said only that Skydance would “phase in new plans for pricing, with discipline and consumer feedback, so we can continue to grow the services” during the bundle phase. Deadline expects a significant discount for taking both services together rather than separately, the pattern Disney set with its own packages.

The pitch rests on difference rather than overlap. HBO Max and Paramount+ are “highly complementary offerings,” Ellison said, that “over-index with different consumer segments and different parts of the country.” Together they reach 203 million subscribers, according to the company, well behind Netflix but closer to Disney and Amazon Prime Video. Warner Bros. Discovery had already shown an appetite for this kind of deal: its HBO Max package with Disney+ and Hulu was an early case of rivals teaming up on a bundle.

The financial picture behind the plan is blurry. The $110 billion merger closed in early October, so the July-to-September quarter largely predates it. On a pro forma basis, as if the two companies had combined at the start of 2025, direct-to-consumer revenue grew 15% year over year. Paramount’s own streaming revenue rose 11% to $2.5 billion, with average revenue per user up 14% and subscribers up 6%, while the unit’s adjusted EBITDA came to $225 million, a 9% margin, weighed down by spending on UFC programming and originals. By 2030, Skydance wants “a meaningful majority of revenue and profit” to come from streaming and studios rather than TV.

A single app remains further off. At the press event marking the merger’s close, Ellison said “the plan is basically to bring them together,” but warned that “it’ll take a period of time to do that,” adding: “I can’t be specific about that yet today.” The bundle is how Skydance buys that time.

Ellison’s case is that the two audiences barely overlap. The bundle will be the first measure of that claim: a single price that has to persuade a household that came for The Pitt to pay for Landman, and the reverse.

Tags: hbo max, Baker Mayfield, David Ellison, Ynon Kreiz, Warner Bros. Discovery, Ted Sarandos, paramount+, streaming, Vivienne Medrano, Imelda Staunton

Skydance CEO David Ellison dates the HBO Max-Paramount+ bundle to early 2027, price still open

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