Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish is officially out at the company.

The entertainment conglomerate in the middle of a sales process is turning to a handful of top executives to run the company on an interim basis.

Chris McCarthy, George Cheeks and Brian Robbins will make up an Office of the CEO, running Paramount on a day-to-day basis for now.

The dramatic change comes as Paramount is in the middle of an exclusive negotiating window with a potential buyer group consisting of David Ellisons Skydance, RedBird Capital, and KKR, with talks circling a plan that would keep Paramount public, but with Skydance and RedBird executives effectively running things and executing a new strategy. At the same time, the private equity firm Apollo has held discussions with Sony Pictures about possibly doing a joint bid, in a deal that would take Paramount private in a merger with Sony and Apollo.

Bakish received a compensation package valued at $31.3 million in 2023, during a difficult year for the industry given the dual Hollywood strikes. He has this year encouraged his staff to focus on execution amid deal chatter surrounding the company and called managing costs and earnings growth the key priority for 2024.

While Bakish has largely declined to comment on the deal chatter, he told analysts on the companys fourth-quarter earnings call that he was focused on creating value for all shareholders (emphasis his), suggesting some daylight between him and Shari Redstone, Paramounts controlling shareholder.

Wall Street analysts have said in recent weeks that Paramount has lost investors amid worries that controlling shareholder Redstone would benefit from a Skydance deal, while regular shareholders would be diluted.

But Wolfe Research analyst Peter Supinorecently changed his rating from underperform to peer perform, while dropping the use of a stock price target. While fundamentally, there remain real risks to Paramounts business in the form ofdeclining linear profitability and a direct-to-consumer segment that we expect to remain unprofitable over the next few years, the rising prospect of a sale of the company to an owner more likely to exploit Paramounts intrinsic value outweighs near-term financial concerns, he argued.

The ouster of the CEO comes after days of recurring chatter about Bakishs future at the company and ahead of Paramounts first-quarter earnings conference call after the market close on Monday. Bakish will not be on the call.

Bakish has long had a reputation for being popular at Paramount due to his more collaborative leadership style that empowered his executives and was open to new ideas. He was also lauded for focusing on striking distribution agreements that went beyond traditional pay-TV deals to include streaming, mobile, and other platforms earlier than his peers. And Bakish encouraged a global mindset with local execution.

He also seemed to have for a long time a constructive relationship with Redstone whose father Sumner Redstone had trusted the CEO title at Paramount predecessors CBS Corp. and Viacom to Leslie Moonves and to the controversial Phillipe Dauman, respectively.

With employees in limbo for years as Redstone battled with Dauman and Moonves, there is no doubt that Bob Bakish was the right CEO to helm Viacom in 2016, LightShed Partners analyst Rich Greenfield and colleagues wrote in a March report. Bakish has been at Paramount and predecessor Viacom for 27 years and played a critical role in improving Viacoms relationships with distributors that Dauman had largely destroyed, while also significantly improving internal morale.

But the LightShed team then called for new leadership. Unfortunately, after making meaningful progress and shepherding the merger over the goal line in 2019, Bakish and his management team made a critical strategic mistake in spring 2020 that has ultimately crippled the company financially, they argued, talking about the creation of streamer Paramount+.