The man behind the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger

Hollywood has been reeling from the production exodus from California, the pandemic, the writers’ and actors’ strikes, the LA wildfires, and the AI takeover. Now comes the big consolidation.

David Ellison, head of Skydance Media and son of tech mogul Larry Ellison, has been on a shopping spree, first buying up Paramount and now beating out Netflix to acquire Warner Bros.

Ellison has a checkered record of making and producing movies. That has executives wondering what he’ll do with two legacy Hollywood studios.

The merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. is expected to bring another round of layoffs, restructured divisions, more cost-cutting, and potentially fewer movie releases — despite Ellison’s promises that the media behemoth will churn out as many as 30 theatrical releases a year.

Consolidation also means fewer outlets for writers to pitch projects to. Less competition means the studios can get away with cutting cast and crew salaries.

And with Ellison trying to gain Trump’s regulatory approval, the Warner Bros.-owned CNN might veer rightward, as Paramount Skydance-owned CBS recently has.

It’s not a done deal, with the Teamsters and others lobbying the Department of Justice to block the merger unless concerns over worker protections are addressed.

But how did David Ellison come to have so much power in Hollywood? For more of his backstory, Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Reeves Wiedeman, features writer at New York Magazine.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Lately you’ve been writing features about one individual. Is it fair to say said individual is maybe the biggest nepo baby on Earth — at the moment at least?

The only credit I’ll give David Ellison in the scheme of nepo babies is that he went into a completely different industry than his dad. He took his dad’s money, maybe more money than any nepo baby has taken — tens of billions of dollars at this point of tech money — and is now pouring it into Hollywood.

He talks about how as a kid he loved the movies, like many kids do. He went to the movies with his mom every weekend and had movie marathons. He actually went to college for business, but quickly figured out that was actually not what he wanted to do. He wanted to go to film school, went to film school at USC, and initially he was trying to do any and everything. He was interested in acting, interested in writing, maybe directing. 

His first foray into Hollywood was acting in a World War I movie [Flyboys] starring James Franco. The way that David Ellison got this role was his dad’s money. Larry had contributed a lot of the money for the budget, and lo and behold, David got a role in the film.

How was his big debut in Flyboys? Was it well received?

It was not great. The movie bombed at the box office. Critics did not love it. He’s not a natural actor, he’s not a naturally charismatic person, which I think has carried over into his business life a little bit. So I think, thankfully for him, he realized pretty early on the acting thing was not exactly going to take and he was going to have to figure out some other way to make it in the business.

And so he becomes a money man.

Basically. He got this notion that many people get when they get into Hollywood, especially when they have a little bit of money behind them: “I’m going to start a production company.” He initially went around, tried to find some investors to pour some money into this company that would make various movies primarily focused on the kinds of movies David liked, which were action/adventure movies.

And the company is Skydance.

The company’s called Skydance. And what they were able to do very early on is they got a deal with Paramount. And Paramount at the time was a struggling movie studio. It’s one of the legendary movie studios in Hollywood, but at the time it was being mismanaged and not that successful and they were happy to have David come in with some money to help them finance and make some movies. And in exchange for doing that, David was allowed to participate in — as they put it in Hollywood — some of the big franchises that Paramount has. And some of those movies were great big blockbusters. A lot of them David didn’t have a ton to do with. 

And then eventually, he started trying to make movies on his own. Some of them were based on original ideas that he and others had. He also had this longstanding goal of making a Terminator movie. Terminator and Terminator 2 were two of the movies he loved as a kid. And he made a version of the movie, Terminator Genisys. Also not great. 

He had this mixed track record of making these big action movies. Generally the ones with Tom Cruise were pretty good. Generally the ones without Tom Cruise based on original ideas, not so good.

And then he makes a really good movie with Tom Cruise.

Inarguably one of the best, maybe the best critical and commercial film of the last few decades, Top Gun: Maverick. And David Ellison, for anyone who wants to criticize him, and there’s plenty of ways and reasons to do it, he deserves a lot of credit for it. Plenty of other people, most especially Tom Cruise, came together to make that happen. But David was one of the people who really kept up the momentum to make that movie happen. To the point of over a billion dollars and some Oscar nominations.

Does that change how Hollywood sees him? Does he become less of a nepo baby and more of a legitimate player?

I think it was really good timing because that movie came out, did incredibly well, everyone in Hollywood loved it. “Tom Cruise is here to save the movies. David Ellison is the one who’s supporting him. Maybe he’s not so bad.” And right at that moment was when David had started his pursuit of Paramount. 

It became public at the end of 2023 that he was interested in buying it. The Redstone family was going to sell the company. Like many industries, Hollywood was going through this real period of disruption. Spending was down, money was down. Covid changed the movie business in particular. And so there was this feeling, at least at that moment, that if not the savior of Hollywood, that David was maybe the best possible person you could have to take over a studio like Paramount.

I think where the opinion of him started to change was in the year between 2024 into 2025, between when the deal was announced and when it actually went through. A lot of things happened during that point, and the biggest was that Donald Trump was elected president. And Paramount is not just a movie studio. Paramount owns CBS, most notably. 

And people will, I’m sure, remember all of the drama that surrounded 60 Minutes and Trump’s lawsuit against 60 Minutes. And David spent a good portion of that year catering to the Trump administration’s needs and wants and desires in order to get this deal approved. 

So David, who had up to that point barely been involved in politics at all, he was not someone who was even really a big donor to politicians prior to 2024, became tied to the Trump administration in ways that made people uncomfortable in all kinds of ways.

You’ve done a bunch of interviews. You’ve spoken with anonymous Hollywood executives. Are they feeling more hopeful in a moment like this where there’s been a bunch of consolidation but also a ton of money infused into the industry, or are they terrified that this is all going to implode?

I did not get any inklings of hope. I think there’s a certain realism that people have that consolidation was going to happen, which we all know the history of, that in any business, things tend to get smaller. Combined with the politics, the fact that David has catered so much to the Trump administration and whether that’s going to continue. And then thirdly, his taste and his abilities as an executive. He is now, as one Hollywood person pointed out to me, he went from being a midshipman to being the captain of the Titanic, literally, because he now owns the movie Titanic, which was a Paramount movie.

At the end of the day, everyone in this business is in it to make movies, TV shows, and to make money. And David Ellison has a lot of that, a lot of money, and he is going to be making a lot of the movies and TV shows that we get to watch.