Who Owns Paramount?

Paramount Pictures traces its origins to 1912, when Hungarian-born entrepreneur Adolph Zukor founded the Famous Players Film Company in New York City with the concept of bringing famous stage actors to the motion picture screen. Zukor's company merged with Jesse L. Lasky's Feature Play Company in 1916, forming Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. The Paramount Pictures name came from the Paramount Pictures Corporation, a distribution company that merged with Famous Players-Lasky in 1916. The combined entity eventually adopted the Paramount Pictures name for all operations.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Paramount was one of Hollywood's most powerful studios, with a roster of stars including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, and Mae West. The studio's iconic mountain logo, featuring a snow-capped peak surrounded by 22 stars (one for each contracted star at the time of the logo's creation), became one of the most recognized symbols in entertainment. Paramount's production of Cecil B. DeMille's epic films, including The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956), established the studio's reputation for large-scale spectacle.

The studio faced financial difficulties during the Great Depression and was reorganized in bankruptcy in 1935, emerging as a restructured company. Paramount recovered strongly in the 1940s and 1950s, producing films including Sunset Boulevard (1950), Roman Holiday (1953), and Rear Window (1954). The studio was acquired by Gulf and Western Industries in 1966, beginning a series of corporate ownership changes that would continue for decades.

Gulf and Western, later renamed Paramount Communications, sold Paramount to Viacom in 1994 for approximately $10 billion, one of the largest media transactions of its era. Under Viacom's ownership, Paramount produced major franchises including Mission: Impossible, Transformers, and the Star Trek reboot series. Viacom merged with CBS Corporation in 2019 to form ViacomCBS, which rebranded as Paramount Global in February 2022, with the Paramount name becoming the umbrella brand for the combined company's entertainment assets.

The launch of Paramount+ as a streaming service in March 2021 (rebranded from CBS All Access) represented Paramount Global's attempt to compete in the direct-to-consumer streaming market against Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max. The service accumulated approximately 70 million subscribers globally by 2024 but struggled to achieve profitability, contributing to Paramount Global's financial challenges and ultimately driving the Skydance merger.