Late last year, our resident Hollywood titan James Cameron got a good deal of publicity for his opposition on principle to the attempted sale of Warners to Netflix, and to the threat that the streaming giant allegedly posed to the future of the movie industry. Little comparable local coverage has since been devoted to Cameron’s public enthusiasm for the Paramount Skydance takeover bid for Warners – a bid being led by David Ellison, son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, one of Donald Trump’s closest friends and political allies.
You have to ask: why did Cameron distrust and disparage the numerous assurances given by Netflix that – for example – it would not interfere with Warners creative outputs, and would not shorten the 45 day “window” in which studio films are shown exclusively in movie theatres before they’re streamed online? In Cameron’s opinion, Netflix’s repeated assurances on those points were “sucker bait.”
Yet earlier this year, the Hollywood Reporter published a letter written by Cameron to Mike Lee, the Utah Republican senator at the centre of federal law-making on competition issues. You can read the text of Cameron’s scathing letter in full here. The Deadline site then published a response/rebuttal of Cameron’s allegations by Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, available here. According to Sarandos:
“I met with James [Cameron] personally in late December and laid out for him our 45-day commitment to theatrical exhibition of films and to the Warner Bros slate,” Sarandos told Fox Business’ The Claman Countdown today in the latest sit-down in the exec’s seemingly never-ending media blitz this week. “I have talked about that commitment in the press countless times. I swore under oath in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust that that’s what we would be doing.” “So I am … I’m particularly surprised and disappointed that James chose to be part of the Paramount dis-information campaign that’s been going on for months about this deal,” Sarandos said,
That’s the paradox: Cameron appears to take at face value the same Paramount assurances [e.g. about its respect for the 45 day window] that he has derided when those assurances were being made by Netflix. In similar vein, Cameron has touted Paramount boss David Ellison as “the right man for the job.”
How come?
I’m not the only person curious about the basis for the selective concerns on display. In its extensive coverage of the Warners sale, the influential tech industry website Techdirt ran the headline claim: “James Cameron is a weird hypocrite when it comes to giant Hollywood mergers.” As Techdirt argued:
As we’ve noted previously, the massive debt load, and the numerous structural parallels between the studios, means the Paramount/Warner Brothers merger will result in significantly more layoffs than the Netflix deal would have seen. And that’s before you get to the dodgy Saudi and Chinese money backing the bid, or the Ellison family’s ties gushing enthusiasm for corrupt authoritarianism.
Cameron at first was dead quiet as the Netflix deal faded and the Paramount merger came into view. But now he’s increasingly becoming gushingly supportive of the transaction …quite the contrast to the….[thousands of] Hollywood insiders coming out against the deal).
Techdirt also quoted from Cameron’s public statements:
“I know David [Ellison] quite well. And I know that he really cares about movies. And he’s a natural born storyteller and thinks like almost an old school entrepreneurial producer that was a storyteller that loves storytelling and loved putting on spectacular shows,” Cameron said. “He’s the right man for the job to run a major studio, and now it looks like he’s going to have two of them, you know, swept under his leadership, which doesn’t bother me at all.”
Two large Hollywoood studios under one leadership? No sweat. For the record, the Huffington Post has usefully listed all of the daunting number of channels that would fall under the control of the Ellison family should their bid for Warners be federally approved. In the wake of Cameron’s letter to Mike Lee, the actor Mark Ruffalo also posted this online:
So… the next question to Mr Cameron should be this…
“Are you also against the monopolization that a Paramount acquisition would create? Or is it just that of Netflix?”
I think the answer would be very interesting for the film community to hear and one that should be asked immediately.We all want to know.…Speaking on behalf of hundreds of thousands of film makers world wide.
Since then, Ruffalo and Matt Stoller, the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, have released an open letter opposing the Paramount bid. Reportedly, the letter now has 5,000 signatories, including industry heavyweights like Robert DeNiro and Holly Hunter. Even so, as Ruffalo and Stoller observed in a recent New York Times op-ed:
But the most revealing thing about that [open] letter wasn’t the people who signed. It was the people who didn’t. Not because they disagreed — because they were afraid. There are many reasons to block this deal, but we now believe the most fundamental one is what we encountered when asking artists to use their voices: fear. A deep, ugly and pervasive fear of speaking out. We heard time and time again from artists, when asked to sign this letter, that they supported it, but were afraid of retribution. Their fear is not unjustified.
Meaning: in the current climate of Trump’s America….being seen to express public opposition to the sale of Warners to the son of one of Trump’s closest oligarch friends is making artists fearful of having their names added to another Hollywood blacklist akin to the one triggered by the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. Recent history also provides plenty of other reasons for actors and craft unions to oppose this merger. From the Ruffalo/Stoller op ed:
After Disney bought Fox in 2019, the combined entity released far fewer movies than it did before the companies merged. Time Warner has been sold twice in just the last 10 years — once to AT&T and once to Discovery — and each deal was followed by layoffs and price increases. If this deal goes through, the consequences for the entertainment industry could be catastrophic, with thousands more workers laid off. Employment in film and TV in Los Angeles has already dropped by 30 percent over the past four years.
One has to wonder why these concerns about the likely repercussions of Paramount’s bid seem to cut no ice with James Cameron, a man known in the past for his social conscience. For example: here, and here.
Cameron, Ellison
Obviously, as a rank outsider who has never even seen the man in the flesh, I can only speculate about the possible reasons for what Cameron has said about the Warners sale, which – presumably – extend beyond his personal rapport with David Ellison. That said, we all now have a stake in learning more about the mogul in our midst. Cameron became a New Zealand citizen in mid 2025, by dint of living here well beyond five years, and belonging to a skilled migrant category.
What is on the public record is that in 2017, Cameron signed a deal with David Ellison, then the CEO of Skydance, which finalised its acquisition/merger last year with Paramount Global. Reportedly, the 2017 deal originally envisaged three films connected to a reboot of the Terminator franchise, which David Ellison had acquired from his sister Megan Ellison who (in her role as CEO of Annapurna Pictures ) had bought the franchise rights for only $20 million at a bankruptcy sale. As Cameron told the Deadline website at the time :
….[We] looked at it as a three-film arc, so there is a greater story there to be told. If we get fortunate enough to make some money with Dark Fate we know exactly where we can go with the subsequent films.”
Alas, Terminator: Dark Fate was not commercially successful. This was unfortunate for all parties involved. Paramount was trying to build tentpole franchises. Yet according to Box Office Mojo, the film’s US domestic take (which accrued to Paramount) came to just over $62 million, while the foreign earnings (which went by Disney’s 20th Century Fox) came to nearly $199 million. Given the major production and promotional costs, trade publications reported an overall loss in the vicinity of $100 million for the parties involved in making Terminator: Dark Fate.
Right. A bomb for Paramount. And an end to Cameron’s hopes that Dark Fate would be a significant strand in a safety net for his wider ambitions. Again, one can only speculate about the terms of the 2017 Cameron/Skydance deal, and the extent to which the Avatar franchise cross subsidies/is cross subsidised by Cameron’s overall film-making enterprises. But one can see why Cameron wants New Zealand to increase its film production rebates for major international film projects made here. Times are tight.
Last month the most recent manifestation of Cameron’s relationship with Paramount Skydance reached movie theatres in New Zealand, in the shape of the Billie Eilish 3-D concert movie Hit Me Hard and Soft. While it may find a bigger audience on streaming, the 3-D hook hasn’t drawn many people into movie theatres. So far, the film has generated only $21.3 million worldwide, and only $8.75 million of that meagre sum has been earned at the US domestic box office.
Hmm. Had these recent collaborations between Cameron and Paramount been more commercially successful, would Cameron have been more – or less – likely to have adopted a more nuanced stance on the sale of Warners to Paramount? No one knows the full rationale for Cameron’s lavish praise for David Ellison, and for his fervent support for the Paramount Skydance bid for Warnner. It may all be selfless and genuine. It may also be driven to some extent, by naked self-interest. That’s show business.
Taking out CNN
If the Trump administration does (as expected) approve the Paramount Skydance takeover of Warners, the implications for the US movie industry are only part of the picture. Approval would also deliver control of the CNN news channel- a Warners subsidiary – to the Ellison family, which has made no secret of its closeness to the Trump administration.
There is evidence beyond a conspiracy theory to feel alarmed. The Ellisons recently acquired CBS News, as part of Skydance’s merger with Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS. A Trump partisan called Bari Weiss was quickly made CBS news editor -in chief, and the once proud network has now become what many industry observers now regard as a White House cheer squad. (BTW, the ratings for CBS News have plummeted after the Weiss era began).The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is also widely seen to have been an early political casualty of the CBS takeover by Paramount.
If Paramount Skydance is allowed to succeed in its bid for Warners, the CNN news network – a Warners subsidiary that Trump has long criticised – will likewise pass into the hands of the Ellison family. In any normal political climate this convergence of power (with all of its anti-competitive implications) would be raising alarm bells, and the proposed merger would probably be refused on valid anti-trust legal grounds.
These are not normal times though. A few months ago, an extraordinary private “oligarch’s dinner” was held in Washington DC by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, to honour Donald Trump and also – ironically -to honour the first amendment protections for free speech.
Besides Ellison, the attendees included a number of people who should not have been in the same room together at such a partisan function: deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CBS news chief Bari Weiss, acting US Attorney-General Todd Blanche, Paramount chief legal officer Makan Delrahim and a number of other top Trump administration officials.To say the least :
Paramount has faced criticism for the dinner, which has been seen by some as illustrative of the cosy relationship between the Ellisons and the White House – right as the Trump administration is weighing whether to approve the company’s $110bn merger with CNN parent company Warner Bros Discovery (WBD).
Another example of the US system of checks and balances being taken apart at the seams.
A fait accompli?
As indicated, only the faintest chance exists that the Trump administration will evaluate the Paramount bid fairly and rigorously. There is some deep symbolism involved here, too. For decades, the conservative right has resented liberal Hollywood, and the decadent, anti-American movies they claim it routinely makes and distributes. Change is nigh, the right hopes and believes. Corporate power over the US news media and entertainment industry is being consolidated in the likes of the Ellison family. The movie industry and US news media outlets may finally be about to be cleansed of their liberal proclivities, God willing..
Point being, the concerns around with the Warners sale are not simply to do with the job losses and cutbacks experienced in previous failed Warners takeovers, like the spectacularly disastrous AOL/Time Warner merger. This time around, the merger risks being about the type of films to be allowed on the production slates to be greenlit by Hollywood’s new rulers.
This outcome is not (quite) a fait accompli. Ruffalo and other opponents of the Paramount takeover of Warners have shifted their emphasis to lobbying for state attorneys to reject the merger on the same anti-competitive, anti-trust grounds that the federal government appears set to ignore. Usually, conservatives are all for states rights v the federal government. Not this time, though.
Finally, one has to go back to where we started. Early last year, James Cameron told the NZ media in no uncertain terms about how horrified he was by the direction in which Donald Trump was taking the United States. All the more reason to wonder about the reasons for Cameron’s enthusiasm for the Paramount bid for Warners, given how this deal, if approved, would further the Trumpian agenda.
To repeat: the Paramount deal is showing every sign of being a significant threat to movie industry jobs, to Hollywood’s creative freedoms, and to the wider public interest. In the past, Cameron has held such things dear. What’s changed?
Footnote One: The Paramount bid originated as a hostile takeover. No wonder. To most moviegoers, the weirdest thing about this whole affair is why Warners is being sold at all. Last year, Warners had a golden year, critically and commercially : One Battle after Another, Sinners, a record breaking 30 Oscar nominations for the studio – breaking its own record set in 2005. For more along these lines read this article from the American Prospect headlined : “The Warner Bros. Sale to the Ellisons Illustrates Perfectly Why Shareholder Capitalism Is a Disaster.”
Footnote Two: As the Techdirt link above mentioned, the Paramount bid was originally co-financed with money from Saudi, Abu Dhabi and Qatar investment funds. The current bid however is being anchored by a $43.6 billion personal guarantee from Larry Elllison, and by taking on $54 billion in debt – a debt burden which will create pressure for major job cuts and much slimmer film production slates. Another key backer of the bid is Gerry Cardinal of RedBird Capital Partners, who has been a significant investor in Skydance, top sports franchises (AC Milan, the Dallas Cowboys etc) media and financial services firms.