One Nepo to Rule Them All

David Ellison won the Hollywood crown. Now what?

Back in December, when David Ellison appeared to be losing his bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, everyone I talked to in Hollywood, where real-world events are seen as just another plot twist in a script, was asking me the same question: So David Ellison is basically Kendall Roy, right? Here was the ambitious son of a business legend who seemed to see moguldom as his birthright. One executive who knows Ellison told me they were reminded of a moment from the Succession finale, when Kendall is flailing to secure his future at the helm of the family media empire. “If I don’t get to do this,” Kendall says, “I might die.”

Give Ellison credit for staying alive. Over the past six months, he made nine different bids for Warner Bros., and each time CEO David Zaslav swatted away the increasingly large pile of money from Ellison’s father and other investors, Ellison came back with more. $111 billion finally proved to be enough. (The Wall Street Journal summed up Ellison’s pursuit in a headline: “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. OK. Yes.”) All told, the auction forced Ellison’s Paramount to pay tens of billions more than it initially offered.

Then again, what do the Ellisons care? “If one is rich enough to purchase a Hawaiian island, a second studio feels like a pittance,” a Hollywood producer who has worked with Ellison told me. Relative to the Ellison-family fortune, those extra tens of billions of dollars are equivalent to putting a down payment on a house, except that instead of owning a three-bedroom ranch, you now control one of the largest entertainment companies in the world: two legendary movie studios, the biggest domestic portfolio of cable and broadcast networks, an array of sports rights that rivals ESPN, and a streaming giant when HBO Max and Paramount+ are combined as Ellison has promised to do. 

Yet the prevailing wisdom is that, among the three principals involved, Ellison may have drawn the toughest lot. Zaslav will make off with a scandalous $790 million in stock and equity from the transaction, while Ellison’s rival suitor for Warner Bros., Ted Sarandos’s Netflix, made $2.8 billion — the fee Paramount agreed to pay to have Netflix’s bid dropped.

Ellison now has $79 billion in debt and a boatload of problems to solve. How do CBS and CNN coexist? Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network? The 65-acre Paramount studio lot in Hollywood and the 110-acre Warner Bros. lot up the 101 in Burbank? And how do you operate two movie studios under one corporate roof? Last year, Paramount announced a version of A Christmas Carol starring Johnny Depp — his first major American film since the trial with Amber Heard — while Warner Bros. announced its own version of Dickens’s tale directed by Robert Eggers with Willem Dafoe as a potential lead. Is there room in one company for two Scrooges?

Practically overnight and pending regulatory approval, Ellison has gone from running Skydance, a production company with roughly 1,300 employees, to running two conglomerates with (for now) some 50,000 employees. He is also now one of a handful of people who will determine the future of the entertainment industry. “It feels like he’s a midshipman and he’s now in command of the Titanic — quite literally,” one Hollywood producer told me. “It’s not like you have clear skies and smooth seas. You’re heading into the most challenging era our business has ever experienced, and all of a sudden David got this thing he really wanted. And did he get there on merit or experience? No.”

History suggests a bumpy voyage ahead. For decades, Warner Bros. has been passed among various corporate homes: Time, AOL, AT&T, and eventually Discovery. None of those deals has worked out especially well for Warner Bros. or for Hollywood. The gigantic debt load that enabled Ellison’s purchase of the studio means that one of his first tasks at Warner Bros. will almost certainly be to fire an incredible number of people. Last fall, Ellison laid off more than 2,000 employees at Paramount in service of cutting $3 billion, and he has promised to find twice that in savings at Warner Bros. (In his campaign against Paramount’s bid, Sarandos argued that the real total required to make the numbers work is much higher: more like $16 billion.) 

When Ellison bought Paramount, even the parts of Hollywood skeptical of his nepotistic rise identified him as a potential savior: a millennial with a love for movies and limitless cash. But the perception shifted as the industry watched Ellison spend the past year leaning on his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and sucking up to the Trump administration in ways big and small. I spoke to one producer who recently heard from an in-demand filmmaker that they were so irked by Ellison’s behavior that there was no way they would work with Paramount now. “I’ve heard it from multiple people who are just like, ‘Life is too short to go over there,’” the producer said. 

Still, Ellison now owns two of a dwindling number of buyers in Hollywood. Many people will have no choice. There are plenty of questions about Ellison’s ho-hum taste in movies, but most of the people I spoke to doubted Netflix would have necessarily made better ones at Warner Bros. than Ellison will. And it isn’t as if the studios he is taking over have delivered a feast of cinematic greatness. Warner Bros. made Sinners and One Battle After Another, but it made most of its money last year from the Minecraft movie. The movies Paramount is distributing this year, which largely predate Ellison’s involvement, include a cascading series of sequels: another Billie Eilish concert documentary, a third Angry Birds movie, international distribution of a fourth Meet the Parents, a fifth Jackass, and a sixth Scary Movie, which parodies movies like Scream — the seventh installment of which Paramount released in February.

The fact that Ellison may be more of a pragmatist than a Rupert Murdoch–style ideologue could serve some cold comfort to those at CNN who fear not only cuts but an editorial shift of the kind that has occurred at CBS News. But Ellison, who has never been a charismatic leader, might need a little Murdochian swagger, both to meet the moment and to match his new peers — the Bob Igers and Barry Dillers of the world, who project authority and treat politicians like Donald Trump as their equals. “It wasn’t Rupert’s job over that entire empire to decide how many people they were cutting from Fox News or what movies they were making,” a Hollywood executive who knows Ellison told me. “It’s to be on the phone with the leaders of the fucking world.” 

“David has such a huge opportunity to literally shape the future — he’s one of one now. He’s 43, and everybody else in that world is fucking 80, so he has the opportunity to be this generational voice,” another Hollywood executive who knows Ellison told me, overstating the age gap only slightly. “But David is not that. I don’t think he has a vision — and I don’t mean a vision for what he wants the company to be but for what he wants the world to be.” (Ellison did not respond to a request for comment.)

What seems certain is that, just at the moment Ellison’s empire is growing, the world he now presides over is getting smaller. His conundrum is crystallized in his promise to make more movies — 30 a year between both studios. Everyone wants to believe Ellison can and will do this, but almost no one thinks it will actually happen. “How are you going to release 30 movies without cannibalizing yourself?” a rival studio executive said. “If you release Dune one weekend, you don’t want to release Transformers the next. You don’t want to release on Labor Day when nobody goes to the movies. There truly aren’t 30 dates.” Before Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, Fox had released more than a dozen movies a year. Last year, it put out half that. “I don’t think that David’s lying,” the executive said. “But I think it might be worse: He doesn’t know that he can’t do what he wants to do.”

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 9, 2026, issue of New York Magazine.

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