On Thursday morning, shortly after 9:30 a.m., Ynon Kreiz, David Ellison and the entire senior leadership team at Skydance walked across the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan to the booth operated by Citadel Securities, where a large gold bell had been set up.
They were there for the first trade, a ceremony that the NYSE holds whenever a public company rings the opening bell, a made-for-the-cameras moment. Citadel trader Peter Giacchi called out the trade. “I’ve got $9 on 519,000 shares!” he shouted, as Ellison held a wooden mallet, striking the bell as the group burst into applause.
Then Kreiz took the mallet and landed a cannon-shot ring on the bell that was so loud that one of the Citadel traders turned around in shock, and even Wall Street veteran Gerry Cardinale’s eyebrows were raised.
As anyone who has ever had a handshake with Kreiz will tell you, he projects strength and operates with force and with little hesitation. Kriez is an avid kite surfer whose post-college job was as an instructor at a Club Med and is fond of recalling the story of delivering his baby daughter in the back of a car in front of Paddington Station in London.
He is, as one person said, a “bundle of energy,” who seemed to thrive most when his (and the company’s) back was against the wall. The COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump’s tariffs, the risky push into entertainment via the Barbie movie. Whenever the stakes were highest, he rose to the occasion, becoming the leader that the moment required, which has ranged from unemotional cost-cutting to to pivoting when business and political winds changed.
Now he is bringing that energy to some of Hollywood’s most venerable assets, swapping dolls for DC and board games for backlots.
“There are some questions about David leading a company of that size,” says a former Warners executive. “Ynon is there to make investors feel better.”
According to people who worked with Kreiz at Mattel, he was a visionary leader, centering the toy company around individual brands like Barbie, Hot Wheels and American Girl. One of his first orders of business was to build out an in-house entertainment division. After all, why license its toy chest’s worth of IP, when Mattel could reap a part of the financial reward themselves? The business model seemed foolproof: Take toys with built-in audience appeal and make a movie that would appeal to that audience, all of which would in turn sell more toys.
At he time, the Lego movie was a massive success story, and spawned a film franchise with spin-off movies, series and video games. And Disney was cashing in big time on nostalgia-laced remakes of their classic animated movies a la Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.
“We look at Marvel as a very good analogy,” Kreiz told Time in 2022 before Mattel has released a single feature film but had an entire slate in development. “That is directionally what we believe we can achieve in terms of the strength, appeal and built-in fan base of our franchises.”
Kriez, who previously served as the chairman of Fox Kids Europe, joined the company in 2018 and started his search for an entertainment chief. He made what many saw as an unconventional choice in Robbie Brenner, a veteran independent producer with studio executive bona fides, who was an Oscar nominee thanks to the 2013 drama Dallas Buyers Club.
The slate that emerged was filmmaker-focused, with seemingly Mad Libs-esque pairings of directors and talent like M. Night Shyamalan, Clea DuVall and Ayo Edebiri with well-known toys like Magic 8 Ball, Polly Pocket and Barney.
The first project out of the gate just so happened to center on Mattel’s biggest property: Barbie. And many people, including the film’s top creatives, credit Kriez with being a hands-on supporter of the film Greta Gerwig film starring Margot Robbie.
“The Mattel board was being skittish and was scared the concept was too subversive. But he supported Robbie and he supported Greta,” says one source. The movie includes the Mattel logo placed over swear words and a Mattel executive getting shot with a (fake!) arrow, not to mention Will Ferrell playing the film’s villain as a bumbling CEO, all choices that could have been shut down. Says the source, “[Ynon] got the company comfortable about being uncomfortable about it.”
“Ynon has a great sense of humor, and I think he thought it was funny,” Brenner told THR in 2023. “To be inside the joke and to be part of it and to be able to laugh at yourself, we all just had to encourage each other that it’s funny. If you’re not laughing at yourself, someone else is.”
In a quote that possibly best encapsulates Kriez’ unique ability to walk the delicate line between corporate-minded and creative-friendly that is required as the leader of an entertainment company, Kriez said of Ferrell’s CEO skewering, “We take our brands very seriously. We take what we do very seriously. But we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
Not all of Mattel’s movies have been major hits or earned critical acclaim like Barbie. Masters of the Universe was a bomb for Amazon MGM Studios this summer, while the new Matchbox movie — made with Skydance and on Apple TV+ today, was skewered by critics.
But Barbie proved to be a resounding success, grossing over $1.4 billion at the global box office, with sales of the doll jumping 16 percent in the fiscal quarter that followed the film’s release. It was also during Barbie’s rollout that the ground shifted under the entirety of Hollywood. The Barbie premiere took place on July 9 in Los Angeles, and less than a week later, SAG joined the WGA in its labor strikes, which slow-rolled directly into our current moment of M&A and consolidation.
Just as Kriez proved adept at leading a company through a Hollywood boom cycle, he quickly got to work at navigating the bust, in addition to a shifting political climate.
Mattel went through several rounds of layoffs over the course of 2025 and into 2026, ultimately affecting nearly 300 employees at the company’s El Segundo headquarters. Additionally, last year, as the incoming second Trump administration started to wage a federal battle against anything it deemed as falling under the umbrella of diversity, equity and inclusion, Mattel, like larger entertainment companies, including Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon, pulled back on these efforts. The company dispensed with its DEI disclosures to investors, scrubbing any references to goals and resources aimed at boosting diversity at the company.
It is these more austere moments of leadership that Kriez will have to call upon as he assumes the co-CEO mantle at Skydance. That axe will have to come to Skydance soon, though Kirez insisted Thursday that most of the $6 billion in synergies will not come from staff reductions.
“When it comes to making those decisions, of course, we’re thinking of our people,” Kreiz said on the NYSE floor, a few minutes before ringing the bell, speaking to CNBC’s David Faber.” We’re going to do it in the right way, respectfully, transparently, and communicate our plans. This will be part of the plan.”