Remake It for Tech Era

When David Ellison had an informal meeting with New York-based media executives at a restaurant in the city earlier this year introducing the Hollywood producer to the kind of people he’d soon be communing with, the vibe was, to say the least, amiable. The Skydance founder was awaiting FCC approval on his bid to buy Paramount, and so he chatted a little and mostly listened, the executives joking about the challenged landscape as Ellison responded with platitudes about his vision for a well-run Paramount. But one point about Ellison stood out to attendees: He talked a lot about gaming.

The emphasis spoke volumes about where Ellison’s eye is trained as he takes over Paramount: Steward a company anchored by a traditional film studio and freighted down by a lot of dated television assets, sure, but also make a big push to digital frontiers. 

Skydance already has a hand in this world with such VR games as Archangel and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, and the chance to develop and acquire gaming companies to pair with Paramount’s robust intellectual properties and 80 million-strong streaming service Paramount+ could prove appealing. 

On Aug.  7, the $8 billion Skydance-Paramount deal finally closes, putting Ellison in charge of the country’s second-oldest studio — and, notably, one of its most troubled media companies. For the 42-year-old, the news represents a remarkable rise, coming just 15 years after he founded his firm and not much longer since he was written off as a wannabe actor and USC film school dropout making vanity projects like Flyboys. Even with the billions Skydance received from Ellison’s family — particularly father Larry Ellison, worth $303 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — his resurgence is the kind of thing biographers devote chapters to.

The comeback for Paramount, on the other hand, is far from assured. As control of the company moves from one prominent American business family (the Redstones) to another, Ellison has talked up his tech game and has cited family friend Steve Jobs as a mentor who gave him early tough love on Skydance.

Certainly the millennial comes in with some advantages: the advent of AI (which, among other things, will make content production cheaper); the use of Oracle’s top-flight cloud service to compete with what Amazon MGM can do with Amazon Web Services (AWS); Skydance’s existing partnerships with Apple and Meta on the gaming side; and even the tantalizing rumors of an Oracle stateside TikTok purchase. (If nothing else, those algorithms will make Paramount+ more Netflix-y sticky.) The automation factor in particular could get supercharged at Paramount, which unlike rivals Disney and Universal has not taken an oppositional attitude toward the tech.

All suggest a company with lots of strategic upside, and those who see Paramount as an also-ran might be reminded that the rules are about to reset for everyone, as AI-powered personalized content and automated production prepare to sweep through the industry. “He’s the kind of person who’s going to take advantage of these innovations,” says a longtime exec who knows Ellison and Paramount but is not tied to either one.

But how much the existing infrastructure will allow such leaps remains to be seen. Paramount is still a company built for the 1990’s, with a network TV business in CBS that is solid if hardly shiny and a cable business that is neither. Film studios are generally not a high-upside 2020’s bet, especially if some of your biggest franchises, like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, are many installments deep.
 
For all the hype about tech, the executive team is largely old-school Hollywood too, as new C-suite occupants such as NBC Universal veteran Jeff Shell, Sony marketing executive Josh Greenstein and even Netflix mainstay Cindy Holland cut their teeth on content, not computation.

No known upstart is yet waiting in Skydance’s wings; no splashy tech import is ready to take Hollywood by storm.

And talk of great tech-content synergies have accompanied many a media merger (remember AOL-Time Warner? Or AT&T-Warner?) only to end up as one more ill-fitting cost-cutting exercise (remember Discovery-Warner?)

One X-factor is Andy Gordon, an incoming board member and a longtime Goldman Sachs kingmaker who’s spent the last five years with Gerry Cardinale’s entertainment-minded investment-management company RedBird Capital — and which along with Korean juggernaut CJ Group has put a lot of money into Skydance. (Along with Larry Ellison, RedBird has also helped finance the acquisition.)

The ties between RedBird and the new Par go deep — Shell comes from there too — and the expectation is that Gordon as incoming Paramount COO and chief strategic officer will run point on exactly the kind of deals for his new company that he made with the likes of SpringHill and Artists Equity at his old one (though, you know, with digital and AI firms).

Ellison is the first figure with any tech ties, even familial, to take over a legacy media company, crossing a bridge that Disney, Universal and Rupert Murdoch have refrained from approaching. (New Paramount president Jeff Shell likes this fact, calling his ally “the perfect executive for the next-generation Hollywood company,” as “he not only can go to a table read, but he can go to the next room and code.”)

At the very least, Ellison’s Hollywood experience has grown; while he was sometimes sidelined as a financier under earlier Paramount regimes, his role morphed into something more consistently substantively creative under recent studio chiefs Jim Gianopulos and Brian Robbins.

Still, getting Hollywood nuts and bolts like talent relations right isn’t easy, and to say Ellison got a “C” on one of his first tests as a mogul — negotiations on a new global streaming deal with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone — would probably involve some grade inflation. A person with knowledge of the negotiations says Ellison reassured the pair’s reps that he would sign off on a deal, but days turned to weeks with no movement. The foot-dragging led Parker and Stone to flex their power, including by threatening legal action against Shell and RedBird Capital over allegedly manipulating negotiations with rivals to lower the price for Paramount. The South Park-ers eventually got their big payday.

CBS’ scrapping of Stephen Colbert and the whole Late Show franchise didn’t endear Ellison much either to the talent community, whatever the extent his knowledge of or wink at George Cheeks’ moves may have actually been. The imminent slashing of deals and inevitable staff layoffs as a cost-cutting wave arrives will further stress those relationships.

And Ellison’s dynamic with journalists will be put to the test as 60 Minutes remains in free fall after Bill Owens’ departure (though Tanya Simon’s elevation reassured staff for now) and a controversial $16 million settlement with the Trump administration widely seen as quid pro quo for getting FCC-approved in the first place. CBS News also will install an ombudsman, scouring for bias, which has sparked anxiety among staff. Acquisition talks with Bari Weiss’ The Free Press will raise questions about the politics of Ellison, who has described himself as a “socially liberal” person; so will his father’s ongoing tight relationship with Donald Trump.

Many of the metaphors around Ellison spotlight his love of flying – he got his pilot’s license as a teenager and has been performing aerobatic stunts ever since – as Tom Cruise and every journalist in town has invoked stalls, tailslides and inside loops to describe Ellison’s approach to challenges.

But in Hollywood the more apt analogy might be to Brad Pitt’s World War Z, a movie Ellison’s money bailed out after its budget ballooned and an explosive climactic scene shot in Budapest (for Red Square) was deemed, in technical industry parlance, bad. Ellison kicked in millions for rewrites and reshoots, saving the film and launching a summer blockbuster.

The irony was that the filmmaking team did this by going small: the third act of that 2013 movie as newly penned by Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard famously featured a much quieter and more intimate ending in which Pitt walks carefully to outwit a single zombie.

The Hollywood meaning is hard to miss: sometimes the unexpected move saves the day. Also, if you take a wrong step, you could get devoured.

Pamela McClintock contributed to this report.

This story appeared in the Aug. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.