Cheeks Repeats Bakish's Bet That Sank Paramount

George Cheeks arrived at Skydance TV's merged division and immediately reached for the same assets his predecessors had already bet the company on — CBS, Sports, News — calling them "fortress assets" for a new era.

Bob Bakish had said nearly the exact same thing in 2022 and 2023, when he was still running Paramount before it became obvious the company was dying. The repetition is striking because it suggests a pattern, not a strategy.

Bakish's bet on legacy linear television was explicit. CBS remained profitable in ways prestige streaming drama was not. Sports rights commanded attention that algorithms could not manufacture, so Paramount poured capital into these certainties while the streaming wars accelerated around them.

By 2024, when Skydance acquired what remained of Paramount, those exact assets had proven to be anchors in the worst possible sense. Not fortress assets but mass weight keeping the company from moving. Bakish convinced himself that the old business would stabilize if he just defended it harder. What he actually did was spend the company's remaining strategic flexibility on assets hemorrhaging value, all while the streaming wars required either dominance or irrelevance. There was no middle position where a half-convinced legacy player could survive.

Cheeks is either repeating the diagnosis that failed before, or he is using legacy content as a holding pattern while Skydance decides what it actually wants to build and is simply not saying so in a staff memo. Watch what actually receives capital investment over the next eighteen months. When a leader reaches for certainty instead of possibility, they are signaling that the organization has stopped believing it can build something new. That is what happens inside any structure when everything outside has already changed.