Sometimes song captures the mood better than any prose.
When it was revealed that David Ellison had won the two men’s bid to be the last king of Hollywood, or at least a key part of its legacy that will hopefully continue, a line came to mind: The title song from Fleet Foxes’ 2020 indie rock song “Can I Believe You?”
After all, Ellison had staked his entire bid — not just the Warner Bros. purchase, but his entry into the world of moguldom — on a sentimental but unverified claim. He was the best person to move Hollywood from its uncertain present to a bright future. He loved movies, he had money he could afford to lose, and perhaps most importantly, he had a vision for how to preserve the spirit of the movie under a suit of technical armor.
But all of this doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, in the words of one of the studio’s most famous films that Ellison has just acquired. The vision isn’t proven, money has a way of drying up with jittery stock markets and even more anxious parents, and if we’re being precise, a lot of people love the movies.
Of course, in some sense, you would have little reason not to believe Ellison. He defied the odds at every turn. The latest example of this came on Thursday afternoon, when the 43-year-old, as several headline writers noted, scored a “stunning” win in directing Warner Bros.’ From under the feet of Netflix and its Hollywood leader Ted Sarandos. The broadcast company has had a deal in place for nearly three months, through all of Ellison’s shareholder moves or the Kennedy Center residence. At times, in conference calls and messages from senior officials, Ellison seemed so desperate that you started to feel bad for him — well, as bad as you could feel for someone who was given a plane for his 13th birthday.
Yet here he was standing with the big prize — a movie studio, a collection of pay TV channels and other assets with a market value of $71 billion. Of course, he just paid $111 billion plus a few extra billion in sweeteners, which could dilute the feeling of winning, like buying $30 tickets at the state fair to win a stuffed animal that costs three dollars. But it’s a prize nonetheless.
He had done so the previous year as well, moving from a minor position as financier to owner at Paramount – Shari Redstone’s preferred savior. And again a few years before that, when he went from financing some marginal films to just as successful ones Star Trek Into Darkness And in the end Top Gun: Maverick. He had already done so years earlier by moving from acting to primarily financing films.
Nebo kids tend to get little credit, and for good reason. David Ellison has risen at almost every stage of the game because of money. And when your family’s net worth fluctuates between $225 billion and $390 billion (I’ll take those fluctuations!), you don’t really have to worry about money. You’re just making others worry about whether they have enough of it. Ellison kept giving more and more for WB, and as amazing as the win was, it would have also been amazing — or at least astonishingly stupid — if Netflix had stuck with it. The company’s initial offer was $82 billion without cable networks, which seemed extravagant enough, and how far it would go. Thus, Ellison’s money (and the money of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi) won.
But Ellison had another advantage besides money. He wrestled on each of these gaming screens with an opponent who was deeply disturbed, at a time when he was most desperate. Ellison began financing his first films in the late 2000s and early 2000s, when Hollywood, rocked by the financial crisis, was desperate for any kind of stable money. He came to Paramount franchises like Star Trek and Top Gun When the company was feeling the pinch from the decline in its cable business; Likewise, he came a few years later to snap up the company (for what suddenly seemed like a princely sum of $8 billion) from Shari Redstone who had nowhere else to go.
He has now defeated Ted Sarandos, who was Public Enemy No. 1 in GOP circles in Washington, as the stunning congressional hearing into Netflix’s trans content showed, and in Hollywood, as every lunch with every agent and executive concerned about the death of a theatrical model can tell you.
Even one of Ellison’s biggest advantages — the Trump administration’s endorsement of blessing these deals — came not because of clever maneuvering on his part, but because his father had already laid the groundwork by befriending the president, even joining in on that now-infamous call to challenge the 2020 election results. All David had to do was sit down with Trump on occasion and maybe gossip. 60 minutes’ Cage every now and then and it was golden.
These are all advantages for which you cannot blame Ellison – do none of us enthusiastically spend the $111 billion given to us or thank heavens that our father was a friend of the man in charge? But lack of guilt is not the same as excess of ability; The fact that Ellison is justified in walking through the doors opened to him is far from a prediction of the ability to open them. What will Does Paramount’s roster look like with a Warner Bros. studio at its disposal? how will Does he take on HBO and in many ways still live in another era of big development spending and hope it all shows up in the Emmys wash?
how He can He runs a CNN network whose only feature is more notable than a free fall in the ratings: how badly does Donald Trump want to hit it into the ground? how He does Paramount competing with YouTube and TikTok (even TikTok is partly family-owned), not to mention navigating Disney-OpenAI and the coming age of anti-native AI? How does he handle any of this without massive cuts?
The man responsible for all these assets has usually done something to show how successful he has been or at least the approach he has taken. But what’s curious about David Ellison’s story – or, indeed, the times in which he lived – is that despite 20 years in the business, there are almost no major strategic decisions you can point to that might answer any of these questions.
Instead, we’re left with the experience of other up-and-coming owners who arrived at greatness with big talk and new dreams only to leave with a golden parachute and a lot of ruined departments. (A current World Bank tycoon comes to mind.)
“I’ve been hurt before, and they won’t let me go.” This is from “Can I Believe You?” Now that’s the only question that matters.
