David Ellison’s Promise to Outspend Netflix and Disney

About this episode

David Ellison has an ambitious pitch for Hollywood: Skydance will spend more on content than Netflix or Disney, crank out roughly 190 series and 30 movies a year, find at least $6 billion in savings and pay down its mountain of debt. All while keeping the creative community happy. How, exactly, is all of that supposed to work when even Wall Street doesn’t see it? Ellison and new co-CEO Ynon Kreiz opened the Paramount lot to reporters Tuesday to sell their vision for the new lockup — and to explain why the old one needed blowing up. “The businesses didn’t disrupt themselves over a decade ago,” Ellison said of Paramount and Warners (just please sunset the moniker “WarnerMount,” he implored). “They didn’t transform, and they held on to the past for too long.” Now he’s betting the combo can create the scale to compete without sacrificing investment. Kreiz’s formulation: “Content is a spend, but you can also see it as an investment.” Is it magical thinking? Elaine Low and Sean McNulty break down what this means in practice: where the promised $6 billion in efficiencies might come from, whether three TV studios and a thicket of film labels can really coexist, and how many jobs could d