Paramount’s Chris McCarthy, Brian Robbins to Get $18 Million Payouts

Thirteen months after David Ellison and Shari Redstone hashed out an $8 billion megadeal that would shift ownership of Paramount Global from the heir of a media mogul to the heir of a tech mogul, that merger finally closed on Thursday.

As the Skydance team, led by Ellison as CEO and former NBCUniversal exec Jeff Shell as president, settles in, the former Paramount C-suite and senior management team have drafted their farewell memos, burnished their résumés and touted accomplishments in the face of a tumultuous few years since the merger of Viacom and CBS in late 2019. The company had more than 18,000 employees as of the end of 2024.

Shari Redstone, who orchestrated the combination of her father Sumner Redstone’s companies, and guided Paramount to try and compete with Netflix in the streaming wars with its own flagship service, Paramount+ (which now has 77.7 million subscribers), will get $1.75 billion in cash for the controlling stake in her holding company, National Amusements. Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, the father of David Ellison, backed the deal as did RedBird Capital, led by Gerry Cardinale.

Only one member of the trio that comprised “the office of the CEO” after the ouster of chief exec Bob Bakish in 2024 will stay on with Skydance, George Cheeks, who oversaw CBS and its assets during the Redstone era and will be the chairman of TV media under Ellison’s ownership. (The exec took home the highest pay figure among his co-chiefs at $22.1 million last year.)

Redstone co-CEO Chris McCarthy, the TV chief who oversaw the building of the Taylor Sheridan-verse on Paramount+, is exiting. The exec was paid $19.5 million last year and will receive $18.3 million on top of his 2025 pay tied to the ownership change, per regulatory filings.

Bakish, the sole Paramount CEO who was let go last April, saw a major silver lining to his abrupt exit: a severance package alone worth $69.3 million of his total $87 million in pay for 2024.

Meanwhile, Naveen Chopra, the chief financial officer, who worked on the Skydance deal, was paid $8.78 million in 2024. He jumped to gaming giant Roblox as CFO in June and, since he left early, he forwent a $12 million Paramount award tied to a change in ownership.

Skydance’s deal brings together the Top Gun: Maverick producer with Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, CBS, Showtime, Nickelodeon, MTV, BET and Comedy Central. Over the past year, the co-CEOs have executed a plan to shave off $500 million in costs, sell off assets and reduce a workforce by more than 15 percent as Paramount shifts ownership.

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The new Paramount Skydance will trade on the Nasdaq as “PSKY” in its latest incarnation. In an open letter to shareholders on Thursday, Ellison wrote that he wants “to empower our creative partners with technology that will enable them to tell bigger, more compelling stories fueled by human ingenuity” but that the company “will face some hard but necessary decisions to align our team for growth and efficiency.”