Another billionaire thinks he can fix Warner Bros.

I'm Ina Garden and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Nathan Lane. We talk about his critically acclaimed run in Death of a Salesman, taking his dog to therapy, and winning an Emmy for Only Murders in the Building. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

Hello and welcome to Dikoter. I'm Eli Patel, editor and chief of The Verge, and Dicoter is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Peter Kafka, chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of the channels podcast. about the gigantic Warner Brothers Paramount merger and the future of the company, now simply called Skydance. Skydance is owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and its deal to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery officially closed the day Peter and I recorded this conversation. Ellison and Skydance have obviously grand ambitions for Warner. But the reality is that acquiring Warner has never gone well for anyone. AOL failed to do anything with Warner, ATT failed, Discovery failed. Although it did succeed in flipping the assets to Skydance. So I wanted to ask Peter if he thinks the Ellisons in Skydance have a real shot at succeeding. so many other companies who've hit the rocks. It will probably not shock you to hear that Peter doesn't think Skydance has a clearer business plan than any of the last few companies that tried to make Warren Brothers a success, but he's got some really good guesses about what they might try next. On top of that, he just wrote a profile of new Skydance co-CEO, Enon Kreeze for Business Insider, and has quite a lot of insight into what he might be tasked with doing at the new company. Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we release new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay, Peter Kafka on Warner Brothers and Skydance.

Here we go. Peter Kafka, you're the chief correspondent at Business Insider. You're the host of the channels podcast. our sister podcast here on the Box Media Podcast Network. Welcome back to Decoder. Thanks for having me. It's big media day again. It's big media day. It's an auspicious day, as my parents would say. It is the day that the Warner Paramount merger closes. We've all been calling it Warner Matt, but uh I'm told this company will instead just be called Sky Dance. Sky Dance Which is quite an a I every time I see the word Sky Dance, I assume

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