In partnership with
I had a great conversation with Daniel Frankel and David Bloom on the Next TMT: Insights on Technology Media and Telecom podcast. And aside from the fact that I look really terrible without a functioning ring light, I had a great time. It was a wide-ranging talk and the conversation inspired the top piece in today’s newsletter.
And thank you to the people who have invested in my independent journalism this week by upgrading to the $40 annual paid subscription. Pushing against the industry narrative isn’t always popular, and it sure doesn’t make it easy to nab those lucrative FYC ads. But I think it’s useful for Hollywood to have a diversity of viewpoints. Thanks for helping to make that possible.
If you’re looking for a way to support my efforts at a smaller level, you can always buy me a cup of coffee.
Okay, David Ellison Is Not Threatening To Deliver A Head Shot To A Dog. Hollywood? Maybe.
The January 1973 cover of National Lampoon is widely considered to be one of the greatest magazine covers of all time.
Designed by the late art director Michael Gross, it's a perfect piece of branding. It's irreverent, it distills the mission of the magazine down to a single image and even more importantly, it not so subtly lets the reader know, "Hey, if you don't buy this magazine, we might not be around much longer."
It's the shock-and-awe approach to making your point. And while I don't think the Lampoon cover inspired Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, he is clearly going for the same effect with this week's flurry of increasingly threatening and sometime contradictory leaks to the press.
If anything, this Paramount/WBD merger story illustrates that irony is dead in Hollywood.
David Ellison is frequently framed as being a producer, not a tech person. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a profile of Ellison that doesn’t describe him that way:
Rather, it’s pure self-interest — survival, actually. These execs see the writing on the wall: cord cutting is eating away at profits and revenues from cable bundles. People go to the movies less — far less — and streaming services are a tough business, too. Meanwhile, Big Tech is looming with troves of cash amassed from gadgets, social networks and search engines to fuel expansion into entertainment.
In other words, media and entertainment need to consolidate because their survival is in danger — that is, unless you want Amazon, Apple or tech-heavy streaming giant Netflix owning the entire viewing world (how’s that for antitrust).
That description is ironic because David Ellison’s march towards media mogul status has been made possible by substantial funding from his tech industry father, Larry Ellison. His dad provided much of the initial funding for Skydance and is also providing a financial guarantee for this Warner Bros. Discovery bid, using the Oracle stock that funds the Larry Ellison Trust.
Moreover, part of David Ellison’s financial rationale for this merger is that he has the ability to use AI and other technology to cut costs (lay off people) and eliminate “redundancies.” All of which sounds like the type of thing an evil tech industry owner would do.
Part of the merger discussion this week has centered on Ellison’s apparent threats to somehow move Paramount out of Hollywood. Which sounds scary, especially to an industry that has been facing severe economic and employment challenges since COVID.
But just like National Lampoon’s threat to shoot a defenseless dog, it’s all bluster designed to spook an already nervous Hollywood. The comments have inspired an impressive number of frantic think pieces in the industry press. But no one seems to have considered what this might look like in real life.
Let’s assume that David Ellison is being entirely honest in background comments being shared with some media reporters. Let’s assume he will really move Paramount out of California and that includes some or most of the current production and marketing arms of the company.
Even in the most optimistic of timelines, this is a multi-year process that will include renegotiating contracts, offering moving bonuses and finding new studio space in whatever Red state Ellison wants to call home. If Paramount began this massive project tomorrow - something no media company has ever done at this scale - the company will still be in the earliest planning stages by the time this legal battle with the dozen state AGs is expected to wrap up.
And then there is the troubling scenario that is being floated by “people familiar with Davis Ellison’s thinking” that the complicated move would be financed in large part by selling off the iconic Paramount studio lot.
So let’s game out the possible outcomes of this threat:
1) The merger fails, Paramount sells off the lot and moves elsewhere. Which suggests David Ellison believes the company could survive the collapse of the merger. And that goes against the thrust of so many pieces this week that suggested a failed merger would bankrupt the company.
2) The merger succeeds. Paramount sells off the lot and moves elsewhere anyway. Hollywood ends up with one less hometown studio and one of the remaining studios is now owned by an absentee landlord.
3) No matter whether the merger is approved or not, Ellison moves Paramount’s C-suite and support staff elsewhere, along with some production that he can get production credits offsets for in the new location. The Paramount studio lot stays, albeit in a weakened state.
4) Paramount stays in Hollywood, although it moves some production to other states and countries to take advantage of available production credits and tax breaks.
Do you notice what scenario isn’t included in the above choices? Ellison moving Paramount because the state AGs continue to fight the merger.
His threat of a move is a long-term consequence to a short-term problem. The move itself won’t have any impact even if the lawsuit stretches out into late May. What matters is the threat.
Ellison is increasingly desperate and much of the desperation is the result of his own arrogance and the tech CEO belief that the best thing to do in any situation is to “Break things first, then ask for permission later.”
It was his idea to voluntarily agree to pay a so-called daily “ticking fee,” which will end up costing Paramount at least a billion dollars before the trial itself even begins. And if the merger isn’t completed by June 1st, he’s agreed to pay WBD a $7 billion regulatory termination fee. Which is a staggering amount for a company that has a current market cap of under $12 billion.
It was a profoundly dumb thing to agree to in the first place. But Ellison was concerned that Netflix might up its bid enough to win WBD. So he bet the farm (or in this case, Paramount) that he could get the merger closed before any of those fees kicked in.
That’s why you see Paramount asking the court to impose a $1.88 billion bond on the plaintiffs (the 12 state AGs), which would cover his ticking fees over the course of the trial. It’s a wild, legal longshot. But if it works, it’s likely the state AGs would drop their case and Ellison will survive this economic near-death experience.
David Ellison is holding a metaphysical gun to the heads of everyone in Hollywood because he has no choice. He can’t survive losing this lawsuit or having it drag out to the point where Paramount has to pay a fee equal to more than half of its market cap.
Which is why you are starting to see arguments from Ellison supporters along the lines of “these two companies are weak and can’t survive without the merger.” Aside from the fact that combining two weak companies into a larger weak one doesn’t exactly solve the problem, the primary reason these two companies are weak are because their CEOs were arrogant and greedy.
And sadly, those are traits that aren’t going to disappear no matter what happens in this merger battle.
Clicking On This Ad Provides A Small Bit Of Revenue For TooMuchTV
We've already vetted your next marketing agency
Vendry runs the agency search for you:
✅ 4,000+ vetted agencies, every channel and specialty
✅ Matched to budget and goals, no generic lists
✅ Your shortlist in about <7 days
✅ $0 for brands, no fees, no markups
✅ Trusted by Shopify, Coca-Cola, Columbia Records, Burt's Bees
Hollywood Failed Hayden Panettiere
As you likely know by know, Hayden Panettiere has died at age 36, five days before her 37th birthday. The actress best-known for her starring roles in Heroes and Nashville leaves behind an 11-year-old daughter, Kaya, whom she shared with former professional boxer Wladimir Klitschko.
The cause of her death has not yet been released, but in her recent This Is Me: A Reckoning, she discussed her struggles, from surviving domestic violence to overcoming postpartum depression and alcoholism. As well as examples of the ways very young women in Hollywood are exploited. Just an incredibly sad story.
This piece in Variety does a nice job of laying out some of the things she recounted in her book and they are horrifying. Even more so because all of these people are likely still working in Hollywood of the music industry:
There was the "important executive at NBC" who kissed her on the lips at a party in 2008 while she starred on his network’s hit show "Heroes," or the time that a star-studded apartment party in Los Feliz took a turn for the appalling when an "Oscar-winning actor and director" cornered a 19-year-old Panettiere as she was about to leave and tricked her into looking at his exposed testicles with the line, “There’s a big wad of gum on my pants.”
"I looked down and recoiled," she recalled in the book. "This well-respected, award-winning actor's testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly...Up to that moment, men in Hollywood had always been kind and respectful around me. There may have been a peck on the lips here and an inappropriate comment there, but nothing had crossed a line."
And that line kept getting crossed, again and again. One of the most shocking incidents occurred when Panettiere was 18 and an actress friend, who she calls Stella in the book, invited her to a yacht party in the South of France. Stella ushered her down into the bowels of the ship and to a cabin where a "famous 30-something British singer-songwriter" lay naked in bed, his bottom half covered in sheets.
As Panettiere told People, when she was only 15, someone on her team began plying her with "happy pills" before she walked red carpets. "They were to make me peppy during interviews,” Panettiere said. “I had no idea that this was not an appropriate thing, or what door that would open for me when it came to my addiction...as I got older, the drugs and alcohol became something I almost couldn’t live without."
There is this conventional wisdom in Hollywood that the so-called “Me Too” movement somehow went too far. That too many innocent men were damaged by allegations of sexual misconduct.
I suspect that if you ask most young actresses about their experiences in Hollywood, they would have a very different take on the situation.
Reporting on these stories is challenging. Aside from the normal concerns over privacy and the consequences of going public with what can be one of the worst moments of a woman’s life, Hollywood’s reliance on relationships as a way of doing business imposes penalties on women who are seen as “difficult,” and that extends to complaints about sexual misconduct.
And because we are talking about Hollywood, there is a lot of financial incentive to protect powerful men who are creating wealth for the people who employ them. That power also means having the money to conduct burn-it-to-the-ground legal battles to save their reputations.
I wrote a great deal about Dan Schneider and participated in the documentary series Quiet On Set: Dark Side Of Kids TV. And despite not having been accused of sexual misconduct in the documentary, Schneider sued Warner Bros. Discovery and the show’s producers, arguing they had defamed him and hurt his reputation. That suite was filed in May, 2024 and the case is still winding its way through the courts and has yet to go to trial.
It is tragic that there weren’t people looking out for Panettiere and that the people responsible for these acts will not just go unpunished, but likely unidentified.
Odds & Sods
“A Very Haunted Renovation”
Ariel Levy, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is joining CBS News’ 60 Minutes as a contributor.
Peacock is raising prices again: Premium Plus goes from $16.99 to $19.99/month, with other tiers up $1–$3; existing subscribers see changes after September 17, 2026. This is the fourth hike in four years amid rising content and licensing costs (i.e. live sports).
The series A Very Haunted Reservation premieres Tuesday, September 15th on HGTV. Here is a look at the trailer. Here is the official logline: "In the six-episode season, hosted by actress Anna Camp (Scream 7), six daring designers, SK Stokes Kennedy, Patrick Peel, John Ryan, Bershan Shaw, Logan Wright and Diana Vogel, will live inside the uncanny abode for 31 days while completing a top-to-bottom transformation—all in pursuit of a $50,000 dollar cash prize. In each episode, the brave renovators will face elimination challenges that put their nerve, creativity and design skills to the test as they bring the home’s spine-tingling spaces back from the dead. Throughout the season, design expert Michel Smith Boyd will mentor and evaluate each unnerving overhaul alongside esteemed guest judges including: production designer Hannah Beachler, paranormal investigator Jack Osbourne, actor Billy Porter, actress Cassandra Peterson, horror film director Eli Roth and actress LuLu Wilson."
The newsletter Animation Obsessive has a really informative look at the animator who inspired the classic Cartoon Network vibe of the 1990s.
Tweet Of The Day
What Happens When Oligarchs Stop Being Polite
I don’t always agree with Matt Stoller, but his newsletter Big is a must-read if you are trying to understand the underlying effects monopolies have on our economy and politics.
Stoller writes about the Paramount merger battle in the context of the ways other oligarchs have used their economic power to get what they want:
The move reflects a sense of desperation, as the LA Times put it. It has potentially embarrassed the California Attorney General, Rob Bonta, and hardened the resolve of the judge, Araceli Martínez-Olguín. One research firm in D.C. that works for asset managers titled their piece on the situation “Ellison’s Ego Ends Near-Term Settlement Prospects.” Ouch.
The strategy here is risky, moving a headquarters of an industry a thousand miles away from the factory floor tends not to work out. One of the key signs, for instance, of Boeing’s decline, was when the aerospace company moved its headquarters from its factory town of Seattle to Chicago. The same would likely be true here; Paramount executives are creative and accomplished, they exist within an ecosystem of producers, writers, editors, actors, technologists, animators, sound engineers, musicians, and directors who can make great content, as well as a set of distributors, exhibitor and marketing specialists, financial planners, agents, talent managers, and so on and so forth who make the business work.
Can you really rip them from Los Angeles without a significant cost? And can you do that while promising to make 30 movies a year? Moreover, isn’t this threat suggestive of the actual power that comes along with the merger? That is, doesn’t it show exactly why it’s a problem for these companies to combine, if Ellison is going to use his might to attack the state of California itself?
What’s Coming Tonight And Tomorrow
TUESDAY, AUGUST 18TH:
Cocktail Wars Series Premiere (E)
Jay & Pamela Season Finale (TLC)
Kelsey Cook: Happy Hour (Netflix)
Return To Paradise Season Two Finale (BritBox)
Take A Hike! Series Premiere (Netflix)
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19TH:
Average Joe Season Two Premiere (Paramount+)
Booked: First Day In Season Five Premiere (A&E)
E.R.: Caught On Camera Series Premiere (TLC)
Expedition X Season Twelve Premiere (Discovery)
Freefall: A Reckoning For Boeing (Netflix)
Lion (NatGeo)
Love Is Blind UK Season Three Premiere (Netflix)
Lucky Series Finale (Apple TV)
Resolve To Solve With Miles O’Brien Series Premiere (PBS)