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The man behind the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger

Is David Ellison Hollywood’s nepo baby king?

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........

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