LOS ANGELES — Two days after Paramount completed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the combined company, now called Skydance, has begun what industry observers describe as the most ambitious integration in the history of entertainment: the merging of every film in both studios’ libraries into a single film.
The merger, which closed Tuesday after a federal judge approved a settlement with 12 state attorneys general, requires the combined studio to release at least 30 films a year in theaters, with a penalty of $30 million for each film that falls short. According to the Center for Measured Outcomes, which has been tracking the project from a parking structure in Burbank, the studio intends to meet that requirement with one film released 30 times, each time starting at a different point.
“It is, technically, a very good movie. It is also every movie,” said Dr. Marjorie Teller, the Center’s director, who has viewed what she described as “the first 212 hours.” “At any given moment you are watching a western, a superhero picture, a courtroom drama, two musicals, and a nature documentary about penguins. The penguins are in all of it. We are not yet sure why.”
The film’s runtime currently stands at 11,400 hours and is increasing at a rate of roughly 40 hours a week as additional titles are located in storage and merged in. Every actor from both libraries appears in it simultaneously, frequently in the same scene and occasionally as each other. A cowboy enters a saloon and becomes a detective, who solves a murder committed in the same frame by a talking car, which is then revealed to have been the cowboy’s father. According to the Center, the film’s opening credits alone run 61 hours and include every person who has worked in Hollywood since 1923, several more than once, and one man from Ohio who says he only visited.
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said consolidation of this kind has historical precedent.
“In the 1600s, the traveling theater companies of Europe merged until there was only one company, performing one play, which contained every play,” Achterberg said by phone. “It opened in 1641 and is, according to the scholarship, still in its second act. I am the scholarship.”
Theater owners expressed cautious optimism. Darlene Fisk, who operates a two-screen cinema in Corrin, Neb., said she had already booked the film on both screens for the next 14 months and planned to sell popcorn “in a size we are calling Generational.”
“People keep asking what time it starts,” Fisk said. “I tell them it started in 1923. They can come in whenever.”
The studio has scheduled the film’s first intermission for March 2031.
Glenn Whitacre filed this report by phone from the lobby of a multiplex, where he said he had been waiting for the film to end since Tuesday.