Ynon Kreiz, the CEO who turned Barbie into a hit and now co-runs the studio that released it

Ynon Kreiz

Photo: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1965 Tel Aviv
Occupation	Businessperson
Awards	Cannes Lions Entertainment Person of the Year · TIME100 Most Influential People

The summer Barbie filled cinemas, the studio that put it on screens was Warner Bros., and the executive who had talked a toy company into making it was Ynon Kreiz. He now sits on the other side of that partnership. As co-chief executive of Skydance Corporation, the company formed when Paramount absorbed Warner Bros. Discovery, Kreiz is responsible for the daily running of the studio that released his biggest bet. David Ellison keeps strategy, the creative slate and technology; Kreiz gets operations, integration and a savings target sized to an enormous debt.

His record explains the hire. Across children’s television, reality formats, online video and toys, Kreiz has been the manager brought in when a media business has to be rebuilt, trimmed or sold, and he has done all three. Ellison’s announcement praised his “operating firepower.” On the Warner lot in Burbank, where staff have lived through a string of failed ownerships, the phrase landed with less warmth.

Kreiz was born in Israel in 1965 and grew up in the Ramat Chen and Ramat Efal neighbourhoods of Ramat Gan, outside Tel Aviv. He wanted to be a footballer until a leg injury closed that road. He took a degree in economics and management at Tel Aviv University in 1991, then moved to Los Angeles for an MBA at UCLA’s Anderson School, finished in 1993 while teaching surfing. At UCLA he met the Israeli media mogul Haim Saban, and joined his business in 1994.

Saban sent him to London in 1996 to launch Fox Kids Europe, a joint venture with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Kreiz ran it as chairman and chief executive from 1997 to 2002, building a children’s pay-TV network that broadcast in 56 countries and 17 languages. Disney bought the parent business in 2001, and he left the following year when his contract ran out. Later he spent two years as a general partner at the venture firm Benchmark Capital Europe.

In 2008 he took over Endemol, the Dutch producer of Big Brother and Deal or No Deal. He pushed it toward scripted drama, but Endemol was carrying the debt of a buyout signed at the peak of the 2007 private-equity boom, and he left in 2011 with that burden unresolved. The next move was smaller. In 2012 he invested in Maker Studios, a network of YouTube creators, became its chairman and, a year later, its chief executive. In March 2014 he sold it to Disney for $500 million, plus up to $450 million more tied to performance, and stepped down in 2016 when the earn-out expired.

Mattel brought him onto its board in 2017. In April 2018 he replaced Margo Georgiadis, who had lasted barely a year, as chief executive and added the chairman’s title weeks later. The first phase was surgery: a cost programme that, by Mattel’s accounting, cut its non-manufacturing workforce by 29 percent and reached $875 million in annual savings by the end of 2019. The second phase was the idea that made his name, that Mattel owned characters rather than products and should be paid for them like a studio. Mattel Films backed Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie, on which Kreiz took an executive producer credit; the film grossed about $1.4 billion worldwide in 2023, the year’s biggest release, and won the Oscar for best original song. TIME put him on its 2024 list of the hundred most influential people, with a tribute from J.J. Abrams describing a man “imagining Mattel not as a toy company but as an entertainment company.” Cannes Lions named him its Entertainment Person of the Year the same summer.

The Barbie story flatters the record. The studio strategy did not repeat on schedule. Masters of the Universe, the He-Man film Mattel made with Amazon MGM and on which Kreiz was again an executive producer, opened in June 2026 to about $29 million in North America and finished near $114 million worldwide, against a budget reported at $170 million or more. A month earlier Southeastern Asset Management, holder of roughly 4 percent of Mattel, had published an open letter urging the board to consider going private or combining with Hasbro, arguing that the rival had executed better in digital and questioning $150 million of new investment spending. Reuters calculated that Mattel’s shares rose about 5 percent during his years as chief executive, while the S&P 500 nearly tripled. He left Mattel at the moment its shareholders were asking whether it should still exist on its own; at Fox Kids and at Maker, too, his chapters closed with the business in someone else’s hands.

That history is also why Ellison wanted him. Paramount Skydance announced the appointment on 30 September 2026; Kreiz left Mattel on 2 October, where board member Roger Lynch, the chief executive of Condé Nast, succeeds him, and joined Paramount three days later. The roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closed on 6 October, and the combined company took the name Skydance Corporation. At the first town hall, on the Warner lot, Kreiz told staff that “the industry is at an inflection point.” Two days later, on CNBC, he was more specific about the $6 billion in annual savings the company has promised within three years: they “will come from technology, marketing consolidation, real estate optimization, and some labor.” He added: “reducing the workforce is a part of that.” On 26 October, the two co-chief executives offered employees a voluntary buyout programme ahead of layoffs and ordered a return to the office five days a week.

The constraints are public. Skydance carries roughly $80 billion of debt, plans to fold Paramount+ and HBO Max into one service and agreed in its antitrust settlement to release at least 30 films a year in cinemas in 2027 and 2028, rising to 32 a year through 2031. Kreiz signed a five-year contract with a $31.5 million signing bonus, paid in restricted stock, and he will be the face of every cut that follows.

Kreiz, a committed kitesurfer, is married to Anat Fabrikant, a former Olympic sailor for Israel, and they have four children; he served as attaché to Israel’s Olympic team at the London 2012 Games and sits on the board of Warner Music Group.

His last Mattel production arrived in the middle of the handover. Matchbox: The Movie, starring John Cena and co-produced by Mattel and Skydance Media, premiered in New York on 5 October and reached Apple TV four days later, by which point its producer had become one of its co-producer’s two bosses. The next test for Kreiz is the one he has passed before and never without casualties: how many people the new Skydance employs once the buyouts close, and whether the merged studio keeps making the kind of film that brought him there.

Tags: business, ceos, David Ellison, business leaders, Warner Bros., barbie, Skydance, Masters of the Universe, Mattel, Ynon Kreiz

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