David Ellison’s spending spree in Hollywood is starting to make Netflix’s industry-rocking largess look Lilliputian.
It has been 37 days since Mr. Ellison, 42, took over Paramount Global as part of an $8 billion merger that combined his company, Skydance Media, with a beaten-up collection of old-media assets — MTV, the Paramount movie studio, CBS — and two streaming services. In that short amount of time, he has certainly made two things clear: He is moving fast, and he has access to a seemingly endless supply of his father’s cash.
Consider this:
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Mr. Ellison outbid Netflix for a seven-year, $7.7 billion deal to claim exclusive streaming and broadcast rights in the United States for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
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He poached the “Stranger Things” creators from Netflix with the promise of theatrical releases for future film projects.
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He shored up the rights to “South Park” for the next five years with a deal worth at least $1.25 billion that includes 50 new episodes of the provocative series.
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He’s planning a “Street Fighter” movie with Legendary Entertainment; a “Call of Duty” movie with Activision; many movies with Will Smith; and, in a deal that puts Timothée Chalamet into the salary stratosphere with a $25 million payday, an action heist movie that will reunite the actor with James Mangold, the director of the Bob Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown.” Paramount will expand its slate to as many as 20 films a year, up from eight.
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Mr. Ellison is also in final talks to to buy The Free Press, an online media start-up that was founded as a rebuke to traditional news organizations, for a price that is expected to exceed $100 million.
And now he’s preparing a mostly cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, CNN and the Warner Bros. movie and television studio, according to several people with knowledge of the plans. The company is worth $41 billion and has $35 billion in debt, remnants of the 2022 merger that brought it to life. Should a deal come to fruition — and the challenges are colossal — it would be a transaction on a par with Disney’s $71.3 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox assets in 2019, a merger that reshaped the global entertainment business.
Mr. Ellison primarily wants Warner Bros. Discovery for its studio, which is loaded with healthy intellectual property (unlike Paramount), and for its HBO Max streaming service, which expects to have 150 million subscribers worldwide by next year. Paramount’s flagship streaming service has about 78 million. HBO also brings considerable prestige.
Regardless of what transpires with Warner Bros., Mr. Ellison’s shopping spree already represents the biggest scene change in Hollywood since 2013, when Netflix began showering writers, actors, producers and directors with money in an attempt to dominate streaming. A little more than a month ago, Hollywood’s creative community was in full meltdown mode. The box office is dying! Studios aren’t spending! Because of tax incentives available elsewhere, Los Angeles has become a ghost town!
Any now? Those worries (and others) certainly haven’t gone away, but there is a noticeable shift in mood: Finally, mercifully, someone wants to invest in us again.
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