The year-long fight over who gets to own Mortal Kombat, Batman: Arkham, and Hogwarts Legacy is finally over. Paramount Skydance closed its roughly $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, 2026, folding WB Games — and every studio under it — into a newly renamed entertainment giant simply called Skydance.

The settlement that cleared the last roadblock

The deal had been legally cleared since May, when the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division signed off. What kept it from closing was a lawsuit filed July 13 by attorneys general from 12 states, led by California, arguing the merger would reduce competition across film, cable, and streaming. A federal judge briefly froze the transaction with a temporary restraining order before Paramount and the states reached a settlement in late September.

Rather than forcing asset sales, the consent decree leans on behavioral commitments: Paramount Skydance must raise domestic production spending by at least $300 million a year above 2025 levels — $1.5 billion over five years — and is barred from selling or shuttering either the Paramount or Warner Bros. studio lots for the length of the agreement. Cable-distribution negotiations for the two companies’ channel bundles have to stay separate rather than being bundled together, and CBS News and CNN now answer to a five-member editorial independence board for certain disputes. Separately, Paramount Skydance settled with the Writers Guild of America, agreeing to a five-year no-layoff pledge for CBS News Broadcast writers and a $17.5 million contribution to the union’s health fund.

With the legal path clear, a federal judge approved the settlement and the companies confirmed the deal would close October 6 — almost exactly a week after the original September 30 target, each day of delay having added roughly $0.0028 per share to the payout WBD shareholders received at closing.

One line, buried on one slide

For a deal that hands a single company the studios behind Mortal Kombat, Batman: Arkham, Hogwarts Legacy, and the LEGO games, the new leadership’s own investor presentation treated gaming as barely worth mentioning. Across more than 30 minutes covering the newly combined company, Warner Bros. Discovery’s game studios came up exactly once, described only as owning “cutting-edge gaming and interactive content capabilities” on a single slide about the companies’ combined “creative engines.” Rocksteady, NetherRealm, Avalanche Software, TT Games, and WB Games Montreal went unnamed; HBO, by contrast, was repeatedly called the deal’s “crown jewel.”

Asked directly whether any “noncore” assets would be sold off, chairman and CEO David Ellison said no divestitures were currently planned. That’s a more reassuring answer than Netflix gave when it was the frontrunner for WBD last year — Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said at the time that the streamer “didn’t attribute any value” to WB Games — but it stopped short of confirming the studios’ long-term place in the new company. Rival executives are already skeptical: Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has publicly predicted that the debt load behind this deal will push Paramount Skydance toward further layoffs as it looks for savings.

What actually changes today

Paramount already built out its own games division, Paramount Games Studio, while the WBD deal sat in litigation, with a slate that includes a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin game, Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, a Star Trek title called Shadow Frontier, and projects tied to Avatar and Star Wars. As of today, that division’s leadership also controls Mortal Kombat’s next entry, whatever comes after Hogwarts Legacy, and the Batman: Arkham franchise — one of the largest single concentrations of recognizable game IP to change hands in years.

For players, nothing changes this week: ongoing games keep shipping updates under their existing studios, and no restructuring has been announced. The practical risk is the same one that’s followed every large media-and-games merger this cycle — a parent company managing significant acquisition debt while treating its games division as a footnote in its own earnings materials is a pattern that has preceded cost-cutting before, even if no such plan has been confirmed here.

For more on how consolidation has reshaped game studio ownership this year, see our earlier coverage of the Paramount-Netflix bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery and our look at EA’s $55 billion take-private buyout, another deal that left a major publisher answering to new owners focused on debt.