Daniel Wolfram
The Trump friendly Ellison’s now own two of the biggest media companies in the world.
Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and The Wire are about to come under the same umbrella as Top Gun, Mission: Impossible, and The Godfather.
Earlier this week, Paramount Pictures announced that it had purchased Warner Bros. Discovery for a whopping $81 billion to merge the two movie studios into one juggernaut.
CEO David Ellison will combine the two studios under his parent company, Skydance, which will also be the new name.
Two of the ‘Big Four’ studios become one
“Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry,’ Ellison said, according to the AP. ‘We couldn’t be more excited to get to work.”
David Ellison is a billionaire who is the son of Larry Ellison, who co-founded the tech company Oracle and is one of the richest people in the world.
It was only last year that Ellison bought Paramount for $8 billion. Now he has combined two of the most storied movie studios, both key pillars of the ‘Big Four’ media conglomerates.
A bidding war with Netflix and battles with California lawmakers
Warner Bros. Discovery and its CEO David Zaslav had been looking to sell off the company for quite some time after a continuous drop in company value.
He first agreed to sell the company to Netflix, but then the Ellisons and Skydance swooped in and gave a better cash offer to WB’s shareholders.
The deal was inked in February, but California Attorney General Rob Bonta held up the deal because he was not satisfied with how the merger would harm the workforce in California and bring the entertainment and news industry one step closer to a monopoly.
Eventually, Rob Bonta and Skydance came to a settlement that has been viewed as extremely beneficial to the Ellisons.
Mounting criticism in Hollywood
The reason why the deal has been dragged out is twofold. Firstly, there is a major concern among industry experts and democratic politicians that the news networks that the Ellisons now own are in danger of catering to the Trump administration.
That fear is because of the close relationship that Larry Ellison has with Donald Trump and the sweeping changes that David Ellison made to CBS News when he bought Paramount last year.
Those changes included hiring Zionist political commentator and blogger Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and retooling 60 Minutes, the most-watched news program in America, which has not been afraid to run damning stories about Trump in the past.
Secondly, there is also an expectation that the merger of the two major studios will cause mass layoffs and job cuts all over Hollywood.
Back in April, an open letter was sent out signed by thousands of movie stars and directors lamenting this merger and warning of fewer job opportunities and “less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”
It remains to be seen if the Ellisons will do the same to CNN as they did to CBS News and how many layoffs they will enforce in Hollywood. Some reports speculate that up to 4,500 will ultimately lose their jobs because of the merger.
