TCM Sticking Around Under Skydance, to Be Overseen by Film Group Instead of TV Team

TCM, or Turner Classic Movies, is not going away as part of the channel’s transition to Skydance (at least not at the moment) and will now be overseen by Skydance’s Motion Picture Group led by film chiefs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, IndieWire has learned. While it’s maybe not surprising that TCM still has a home at the newly merged conglomerate, fans of the classic movie cable channel certainly have questions about its future and would love to see it survive in the long run, especially when its existence was in doubt not long ago under different leadership at Warner Bros. Discovery. The important clarity now though is that it’s the film chiefs calling the shots, not the TV division, which is led by George Cheeks and below him former WB exec Channing Dungey, who is overseeing all of the other cable networks at the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. It was film chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, who are now out of the picture at Skydance, who were previously overseeing TCM, so who takes the reins was an important question. Dungey previously had TCM among her portfolio, but Goldberg and Greenstein have talked the talk about being good stewards of these two legacy film brands. Way back in 2023, TCM was hit by layoffs, with some of the cable channel’s top leadership ousted, and it looked like the future of the channel was seriously in doubt. This was still in the early days of Warner Bros. Discovery when David Zaslav and company were looking everywhere they could to write down debt and when entire movies like “Batgirl” were shelved for tax purposes. So Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson all convened with Zaslav for an emergency meeting and ultimately agreed to serve as advisors who would shepherd the channel’s programming. We even reported by the end of 2024 that HBO Max was expanding its TCM content with even more curated classic titles available for streaming all under a TCM tile. Skydance, though, has $80 billion in debt to deal with after this merger. While it has said at least $6 billion of savings will come from technology improvements, real estate, and other efficiencies rather than strictly in labor costs, it’s natural to wonder what among Skydance’s now massive portfolio of cable channels could be sunsetted, sold, spun-off, or what. In fact, we raised similar questions about this when it looked like Netflix might be the owners of TCM, not Paramount Skydance. Though Netflix wasn’t going to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s cable channels, it was going to end up acquiring TCM among the assets that the film studios group owned. We discussed a future where Netflix could expand the programming and reach of the channel by launching a digital FAST channel where it could live even if it didn’t want to maintain the linear network. It will be intriguing to see what vision Goldberg and Greenstein have for it instead. Deadline first reported the TCM news.