After 19 torturous months of wrangling, appeasing, jockeying, promising and placating, David Ellison has finally won government approval to buy Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, MTV and Hollywood’s oldest movie studio.
Now comes the hard part.
Mr. Ellison, 41, has vowed to take the venerable but troubled collection of media assets and overhaul them for the TikTok age. He wants to exorcise the ghosts of glory days gone by — to rid the company of this-is-how-we-have-always-done-it thinking — and create a media-technology hybrid that can compete with Netflix, YouTube and whatever the artificial intelligence revolution has in store.
New Paramount will be “the pace car for how these incumbent legacy media businesses will need to be run in the future,” Gerry Cardinale, one of Mr. Ellison’s backers, said when the $8 billion deal was announced last year.
To achieve his goal, Mr. Ellison will need to do things that Hollywood hates.
Fat expense accounts? Armies of consultants? Gone. Most of Mr. Ellison’s financial backing comes from his father, Larry Ellison, the tech magnate and one of the richest people in the world. But the Ellisons have shown a lack of tolerance for Hollywood largess. As chief executive of what he has referred to as New Paramount, David Ellison plans to slash and burn through Paramount Global divisions to find more than $2 billion in “cost efficiencies and synergies.”
Chris McCarthy, Paramount’s top cable and streaming executive, has already been squeezed out. (He made $19.5 million last year, according to regulatory filings.) Also expected to leave: Brian Robbins, who has led Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon since 2021. (He made $19.6 million last year.)
At the same time, Mr. Ellison plans to enthusiastically embrace technology, including artificial intelligence. So far, Hollywood studios — deeply resistant to change — have mostly taken a plodding approach to A.I. because of concerns about how the software is built, how copyright holders are compensated and how unions might react.
“Technology will transform every single aspect of this company,” Mr. Ellison said on CNBC last year. He went on to speak about the promise of something he called “studio in the cloud.” He wants to build a fully digital, cloud-based production and postproduction pipeline — a next-generation studio that leverages cloud computing, A.I. and other digital tools to generate content faster and cheaper.
Mr. Ellison, who declined to comment for this article, has substantial experience in movie and television production. His company, Skydance Media, which will be merged with Paramount Global, has been involved with the last five “Mission: Impossible” movies. It also helped produce “Top Gun: Maverick,” which collected $1.5 billion at the box office in 2022. Skydance’s television hits have included “Grace and Frankie” on Netflix and “Jack Ryan” on Amazon’s Prime Video.
But Mr. Ellison is Bambi-legged in other respects.
He has never run a company even remotely close to the size of New Paramount. Skydance has 1,300 employees; Paramount Global has about 18,000.
He hasn’t overseen cable or streaming. The Paramount networks, which include Comedy Central and BET, have been on life support. The Paramount+ streaming service is glitchy and loses money. (Mr. Ellison’s tech background should help on that front. He will also have help from Jeff Shell, who will be president of New Paramount and who once ran NBCUniversal.)
Mr. Ellison also has no experience in the rough-and-tumble news business. CBS News, which produces “60 Minutes” and “Face the Nation,” has been in turmoil, with journalists in revolt over a settlement to a lawsuit brought by President Trump. It hasn’t helped that Mr. Ellison has held talks to acquire The Free Press, the online publication that positions itself as an alternative to mainstream news organizations and is often critical of them.
Mr. Ellison’s interest in Paramount Global broke into public view in December 2023. The company’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, agreed to sell to Mr. Ellison in July 2024. But then the deal sat in regulatory purgatory.
The Federal Communications Commission finally said on Thursday that it would allow Paramount Global to merge with Skydance, citing assurances from Mr. Ellison that the new company would commit itself to unbiased journalism and would not establish programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
The transaction is expected to officially close within two weeks.
The F.C.C.’s decision came after Paramount Global paid $16 million to settle a “60 Minutes” lawsuit brought by President Trump. Critics of the settlement, including the CBS “Late Night” host Stephen Colbert, blasted it as a payoff (“a big, fat bribe” in Mr. Colbert’s words) to secure approval from the Trump administration. Paramount has rejected those claims.
Many people in left-leaning Hollywood have been shaken by what it took to get the sale to Skydance over the line.
Soothing those disgruntled talent partners will test Mr. Ellison’s skills as a statesman. Spending money on scripts and signing stars to production deals always helps. Mr. Ellison is finalizing a deal with Will Smith to make films for Paramount, a Puck newsletter reported on Thursday.
While the Skydance-Paramount deal has lingered in the hands of regulators, Mr. Ellison has said nothing in public. Surrogates, however, have positioned him as talent-friendly, perhaps to offset anxiety about his tech plans. “David Ellison is first and foremost a filmmaker,” Dean Devlin, a producer of films like “Independence Day” and “Geostorm,” told the trade news site Deadline. “He’s a creative first. He’s a fan. He’s an artist.”
Ben Affleck, Jane Fonda and Jeffrey Katzenberg have also praised Mr. Ellison: Don’t worry, he cares about Hollywood legacy.
Mr. Ellison is nothing if not dogged.
He arrived in Hollywood in 2005, dropping out of the University of Southern California to act in and finance a $60 million movie called “Flyboys,” a World War I aerial combat tale that Mr. Devlin produced. It was a critical and commercial catastrophe, receiving terrible reviews and collecting $17 million worldwide.
By 2010, Mr. Ellison had given up acting and become a financier and producer. He poured $350 million into Paramount movies like “Star Trek Into Darkness.” But Hollywood snickered at his effort to be taken seriously as a creative force, as did the news media. He came across as wooden — the epitome of “dumb money,” the Hollywood term for a gullible, affluent outsider bitten by the movie bug.
Undaunted, Mr. Ellison kept pushing forward. By 2022, when private equity firms like RedBird and KKR invested in Skydance, the 16-year-old company was valued at roughly $4 billion.
And now he’s Hollywood newest (and youngest) mogul, with all of the power — and problems — that come with the job.
Nicole Sperling contributed reporting.