Cindy Holland Exits Paramount, Casey Bloys To Lead Streamer

Her last day was Tuesday, and the departure all but confirms HBO's Casey Bloys will steer the merged Paramount+ and HBO Max operation once the Warner Bros. Discovery deal closes.

Cindy Holland is out at Paramount Skydance, and her exit answers the one question everyone in the streaming business has been chewing on since the Warner Bros. Discovery deal was announced: who actually runs the combined service.

Holland, who held the title of Chair of Direct-to-Consumer, told staff in a memo Tuesday that Tuesday would be her last day. Deadline and TheWrap both reported the news within minutes of each other. Her departure clears the runway for Casey Bloys, the chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max Content, to take charge of what will eventually be a single streaming platform built out of Paramount+ and HBO Max.

In her note, Holland didn't dress it up much. "David is optimizing for HBO stability as we move into this next chapter, and I fully support that," she wrote, referring to Paramount CEO David Ellison. Translation: it came down to her or Bloys, and the company picked Bloys.

Ellison, for his part, called Holland "a force of nature" in a statement carried by both outlets, crediting her with taking Paramount+ to record subscriber numbers and overseeing what TheWrap reported was a Q2 tally of more than 81 million subscribers worldwide. Her run also included the biggest product overhaul in a decade for Pluto TV, according to her own memo, plus new sports deals with UFC, Zuffa Boxing and expanded WNBA and UEFA Champions League rights.

On the content side, Holland's team greenlit over 40 series, by her count, and landed two records for the platform: Landman as the most-watched show in Paramount+ history and Dutton Ranch as its biggest series debut. She's also credited with helping bring the Duffer Brothers, the Stranger Things creators she'd championed back at Netflix, into an deal at Paramount.

Holland joined Ellison's team as an advisor in January 2025, well before the Paramount-Skydance merger even closed, and Deadline noted her memo suggests WBD may have been a target on Ellison's radar months before he made his first unsolicited bid in September of that year. She moved into the DTC chair role in August 2025.

This isn't Holland's first rebuild job. She spent nearly two decades at Netflix, nine of them as VP of Original Content, and was behind the streamer's initial scripted push, House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, BoJack Horseman, The Crown and The Queen's Gambit among them. She left Netflix in September 2020, did board and advisory work, ran Elisabeth Murdoch and Jane Featherstone's Sister for 15 months starting in 2023, and then landed at Skydance.

What happens to her deputies is the open question now. Paramount+'s Head of Originals Jane Wiseman worked under Holland at both Netflix and Sister, and the two built the streamer's current slate together, including a pivot toward what Deadline called female-led dramas, starting with Nicole Kidman's Discretion, which just began shooting. Bloys has said he wants to keep his own HBO team intact once WBD comes under Paramount's roof, so how much of Holland's bench survives the integration remains to be seen.

Ellison has talked about a combined platform crossing 200 million subscribers once HBO Max and Paramount+ merge into one service. Nobody at Paramount has put a date on that yet.