Ted Sarandos\u2019s Netflix, made $2.8 billion<\/a> \u2014 the fee Paramount agreed to pay to have Netflix\u2019s bid dropped.<\/p>\nEllison now has $79 billion in debt and a boatload of problems to solve. How do CBS and CNN coexist? Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network? The 65-acre Paramount studio lot in Hollywood and the 110-acre Warner Bros. lot up the 101 in Burbank? And how do you operate two movie studios under one corporate roof? Last year, Paramount announced a version of A Christmas Carol starring Johnny Depp \u2014 his first major American film since the trial with Amber Heard \u2014 while Warner Bros. announced its own version of Dickens\u2019s tale directed by Robert Eggers with Willem Dafoe as a potential lead. Is there room in one company for two Scrooges?<\/p>\n
Practically overnight and pending regulatory approval, Ellison has gone from running Skydance, a production company with roughly 1,300 employees, to running two conglomerates with (for now) some 50,000 employees. He is also now one of a handful of people who will determine the future of the entertainment industry. \u201cIt feels like he\u2019s a midshipman and he\u2019s now in command of the Titanic \u2014 quite literally,\u201d one Hollywood producer told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not like you have clear skies and smooth seas. You\u2019re heading into the most challenging era our business has ever experienced, and all of a sudden David got this thing he really wanted. And did he get there on merit or experience? No.\u201d<\/p>\n
History suggests a bumpy voyage ahead. For decades, Warner Bros. has been passed among various corporate homes: Time, AOL, AT&T, and eventually Discovery. None of those deals has worked out especially well for Warner Bros. or for Hollywood. The gigantic debt load that enabled Ellison\u2019s purchase of the studio means that one of his first tasks at Warner Bros. will almost certainly be to fire an incredible number of people. Last fall, Ellison laid off more than 2,000 employees at Paramount in service of cutting $3 billion, and he has promised to find twice that in savings at Warner Bros. (In his campaign against Paramount\u2019s bid, Sarandos argued that the real total required to make the numbers work is much higher: more like $16 billion.)<\/p>\n
When Ellison bought Paramount, even the parts of Hollywood skeptical of his nepotistic rise identified him as a potential savior: a millennial with a love for movies and limitless cash. But the perception shifted as the industry watched Ellison spend the past year leaning on his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and sucking up to the Trump administration in ways big and small. I spoke to one producer who recently heard from an in-demand filmmaker that they were so irked by Ellison\u2019s behavior that there was no way they would work with Paramount now. \u201cI\u2019ve heard it from multiple people who are just like, \u2018Life is too short to go over there,\u2019\u201d the producer said.<\/p>\n
Still, Ellison now owns two of a dwindling number of buyers in Hollywood. Many people will have no choice. There are plenty of questions about Ellison\u2019s ho-hum taste in movies, but most of the people I spoke to doubted Netflix would have necessarily made better ones at Warner Bros. than Ellison will. And it isn\u2019t as if the studios he is taking over have delivered a feast of cinematic greatness. Warner Bros. made Sinners and One Battle After Another, but it made most of its money last year from the Minecraft movie. The movies Paramount is distributing this year, which largely predate Ellison\u2019s involvement, include a cascading series of sequels: another Billie Eilish concert documentary, a third Angry Birds movie, international distribution of a fourth Meet the Parents, a fifth Jackass, and a sixth Scary Movie, which parodies movies like Scream \u2014 the seventh installment of which Paramount released in February.<\/p>\n
The fact that Ellison may be more of a pragmatist than a Rupert Murdoch\u2013style ideologue could serve some cold comfort to those at CNN who fear not only cuts but an editorial shift of the kind that has occurred at CBS News. But Ellison, who has never been a charismatic leader, might need a little Murdochian swagger, both to meet the moment and to match his new peers \u2014 the Bob Igers and Barry Dillers of the world, who project authority and treat politicians like Donald Trump as their equals. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t Rupert\u2019s job over that entire empire to decide how many people they were cutting from Fox News or what movies they were making,\u201d a Hollywood executive who knows Ellison told me. \u201cIt\u2019s to be on the phone with the leaders of the fucking world.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDavid has such a huge opportunity to literally shape the future \u2014 he\u2019s one of one now. He\u2019s 43, and everybody else in that world is fucking 80, so he has the opportunity to be this generational voice,\u201d another Hollywood executive who knows Ellison told me, overstating the age gap only slightly. \u201cBut David is not that. I don\u2019t think he has a vision \u2014 and I don\u2019t mean a vision for what he wants the company to be but for what he wants the world to be.\u201d (Ellison did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n
What seems certain is that, just at the moment Ellison\u2019s empire is growing, the world he now presides over is getting smaller. His conundrum is crystallized in his promise to make more movies \u2014 30 a year between both studios. Everyone wants to believe Ellison can and will do this, but almost no one thinks it will actually happen. \u201cHow are you going to release 30 movies without cannibalizing yourself?\u201d a rival studio executive said. \u201cIf you release Dune one weekend, you don\u2019t want to release Transformers the next. You don\u2019t want to release on Labor Day when nobody goes to the movies. There truly aren\u2019t 30 dates.\u201d Before Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, Fox had released more than a dozen movies a year. Last year, it put out half that. \u201cI don\u2019t think that David\u2019s lying,\u201d the executive said. \u201cBut I think it might be worse: He doesn\u2019t know that he can\u2019t do what he wants to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
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