Paramount/Skydance Merger

Yes, this is TMNT related.

Maybe someone with better knowledge on the subject could ease my mind here, BUT I just had a horrible thought.

Paramount is in financial straits and supposedly being bought out by Skydance.

Nickelodeon is a division of Paramount.

Nickelodeon owns the Turtles.

Are we about to lose our Ninja Turtles license holders? Are we about to lose NECA TMNT?

Just MY understanding of how this will work: It depends.

If Skydance just becomes the owner, and Paramount remains a subsidiary of Skydance, and Nickelodeon remains a division of Paramount; nothing is likely to change. Especially nothing that's working (which is actually usually the licensing deals which effectively cost the parent company no money at all to keep active, and in fact make them money).

The only way I can see things like licensing deals being dumped is if they do something like completely dissolve Nickelodeon. They -could-. But that seems rather extreme and unlikely.

We're more likely to just see a bunch of people at Nickelodeon and Paramount fired for some good ol' fashioned 'restructuring.' But that shouldn't impact licensing in the short term. In the LONG term, it could mean different people are in charge when it comes time to renew deals, and that could certainly have a much bigger impact on licensing. Maybe they'll decide not to renew with NECA. Or maybe, totally different take, they'll decide not to grant the master license to Playmates anymore and NECA may get an even broader net to cast on the property.

Or they'll install someone way more hands-on and no one will even want the license because the licensor has become absolutely impossible to work with. Who knows.

For what it's worth, I haven't heard any rumblings that anyone at Playmates is currently concerned, so that's something.

It might not mean much for the legacy brands within TMNT. Given who is at the top of Skydance, I would say the biggest concern from a TMNT perspective is how it would impact the current iteration. I could certainly see them looking at Mutant Mayhem and deeming it “woke” thus taking an axe to that and embarking on a reboot to please a different crowd.

Misfit said:

It might not mean much for the legacy brands within TMNT. Given who is at the top of Skydance, I would say the biggest concern from a TMNT perspective is how it would impact the current iteration. I could certainly see them looking at Mutant Mayhem and deeming it “woke” thus taking an axe to that and embarking on a reboot to please a different crowd.

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Oh, Jesus. I hadn't even considered that aspect of it.

We live in dark times.

Personally, I'm less worried about that at the moment. And that's ONLY because most companies, including those regularly putting out 'woke' content, are run by right-wingers (because right-wingers are the ones most likely to be in a mental state conducive to wildly mistreating people to the level necessary to become owners of big corporations).

At the end of the day, CEOs don't actually believe in anything. That's the harm and beauty of Capitalism. Most of these guys (certainly not all) will put out whatever content makes them money. If TMNT's current iteration is making money and there's nothing on the table for TMNT that they feel will make -more- money, then they're unlikely to mess with it. They don't -really- worship God, they worship money. And they don't believe in ideologies, they believe in profit. Simple as that. But time will tell, to be sure.

I swear if those dunder heads kill off any chance of another TMNT/Star Trek crossover, I'm gonna pee in the CEO's gas tank.