The clearest line on Ynon Kreiz’s résumé is a doll. As chairman and chief executive of Mattel, he took Barbie, a plastic toy more than six decades old, and turned it into the highest-grossing film of 2023 and the biggest movie Warner Bros. Pictures has ever released. Now David Ellison is betting that the same knack for turning old franchises into new revenue can do the work of stitching together the two studios he is about to combine.
Paramount Skydance said on September 30 that Kreiz would become co-chief executive alongside Ellison, with the appointment taking effect before the close of the company’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Ellison will keep the title of chairman and chief executive and run strategy, creative direction and technology, along with talent relationships and capital allocation. Kreiz will own the harder, less glamorous half: day-to-day operations and the integration of the combined businesses.
The timing is not accidental. Paramount is days from closing its $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal expected to complete on October 6. Kreiz starts on October 5. A federal judge has approved the settlement of an antitrust lawsuit brought by a dozen state attorneys general, clearing the last significant obstacle in front of the merger. Ellison’s announcement landed minutes after that ruling, the moment the path to closing finally looked certain.
The division of labor reads like a confession about what the new company will actually need. Ellison, the Skydance founder who bought Paramount in August 2025, has spent the past year talking about creative ambition, a doubled theatrical slate and a streaming platform that could top 200 million subscribers. Kreiz’s brief is the unglamorous one: make two massive, overlapping bureaucracies operate as one without the cost and chaos that usually follow a merger of this size.
Kreiz arrives with a record that fits the assignment. At Mattel, which he has run since 2018, he pressed the company’s brands, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price and the rest, into film, television, games and live events, a deliberate shift from a toy maker that licensed its characters to a studio that controlled them. The Barbie film was the proof of concept, a $1.4 billion global hit that taught Wall Street to read Mattel as a content company with a toy business attached.
His earlier career runs through the same territory. Kreiz co-founded Fox Kids Europe, ran the television producer Endemol, and served as chairman and chief executive of Maker Studios, the YouTube-focused network Disney bought in 2014. He left Disney in 2016 and landed at Mattel two years later. It is a background in packaging franchises, not in running a network or a film lot, which is precisely the skill the combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will demand.
Mattel moved quickly to fill the hole he leaves. The company said Kreiz would step down effective October 2 and named Roger Lynch, the chief executive of Condé Nast, as its next chief executive. The speed of the handoff, and Kreiz’s willingness to walk away from a turnaround he is widely credited with, says something about the scale of what Ellison is offering: a seat running one of the largest media companies ever assembled.
The combined portfolio is a list of names a media executive could spend a career trying to assemble. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, CBS and CNN, HBO and Nickelodeon, Paramount+ and Max, plus the Skydance animation and games businesses, serving audiences in more than 200 countries. Kreiz’s job, as Ellison framed it, is to give that catalog “operational firepower” and to run the integration that turns a list of brands into a single company.
The risk is that the two halves of the job sit oddly together. Ellison is the creative and strategic principal; Kreiz is the operator. Two chief executives means two answers to the question of who is in charge, and the company has said the businesses will report jointly to both. That structure has failed as often as it has worked in media, and the integration Kreiz has been hired to run is exactly the kind of slow, grinding work that two leaders can undermine without meaning to.
The bet behind the hire is that the assets, not the org chart, will carry the day. Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount hold two of Hollywood’s deepest libraries, and the combined company will need to mine them the way Mattel mined its toy aisle. Kreiz’s eight years proved he can take a dusty brand and make it new. Now he has been handed a much larger shelf of them, with a merger deadline as the first test.
For Ellison, the appointment closes a loop he has been drawing since he first pursued Paramount. He wanted both studios, and he has spent a year positioning himself to run them. Bringing in Kreiz is an admission that buying them was the easy part.
