There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a good villain arc; after all, antiheroes are always the most interesting characters in pretty much every project, from Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, to Kevin Spacey in House of Cards, to Kevin Spacey in real life (his recent penchant for impromptu lounge performances is just the perfect kind of creepy).
Let’s not forget, the industry practically runs on villains. What would the industry be without the likes of Darth Vader, Thanos, Hannibal Lecter, or Rupert Murdoch? Still stuck somewhere in Act 2, likely. But while Hollywood has a long history of creating memorable villains onscreen, inevitably, the industry runs into a real one – and they’re always infinitely more terrifying than their fictional counterparts.
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From Louis B. Mayer to Robert Evans to Mike Ovitz, occasionally the entertainment ecosystem runs into someone with enough money, influence, and ambition to leave their mark – for better or worse – on the entire industry.
It’s been a few years since Scott Rudin was soft-canceled, though, so it’s been quite a while since Hollywood had a real-life super villain swoop in and turn Burbank into their own personal Arkham City. Which is why the arrival of the Ellisons seems inevitable; after all, they’re perfectly cast in the role they’ve been preparing for their entire lives.
Some backstory: Larry Ellison founded Oracle, somehow turning what began as a tech company specializing in databases and back office administration into one of the world’s biggest fortunes – and then, doing what tech billionaires do best.
He bought Lanai, one of the principal Hawaiian islands, where he can enjoy his privacy, the balmy winds of the South Seas, and a couple of hundred natives unlucky enough to serve El Jefe in an arrangement that effectively functions as a private corporate fiefdom.
Staying in Dickensian character, he also decided to invest billions of dollars into yachting, which is admittedly way more fun than spending it on philanthropic causes or even a believable set of hair plugs. Somehow, in between all those regattas and hostile takeovers, he still makes time for the occasional round of golf with his BFF, who also happens to be POTUS.
That’s more proximity to power than anyone in Hollywood has had since Joe Kennedy founded RKO. Kennedy famously bankrolled his son’s path to the presidency; with his plans for doing the same likely foiled by that guy from The Apprentice, Ellison decided he’d give his son the second most powerful office in the country: a movie producer with an essentially unlimited bankroll.
According to Forbes’ Billionaire Rankings, Larry’s net worth sits somewhere north of $190 billion dollars; for comparison, Disney’s total content spending across all of its businesses in 2025 was around $23 billion.
So it was no great hardship when he staked his son David the cash to launch Skydance Media all the way back in 2006 – or at least most of it, with the balance supplemented by outside investors, including Tencent, because, you know, super villains gonna super villain.
At first, this looked like the standard nepo-baby vanity project in a town full of them. It’s almost like a rite of passage: wealthy heirs show up on Sunset, splash their cash around to finance a few forgettable films, and then realize that movies are a pretty hard way to spend all that leisure time, and ultimately move to safer hobbies, like venture capital.
To David’s credit, SkyDance is the exception to the norm, transforming itself into a reliable hit maker behind some of the biggest blockbuster franchises of the past two decades.
Think Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible, or the Star Trek reboot. Of course, when you have that sort of cash, you can splurge on the rights to reliable, lucrative IP and the sort of production budget that makes Ridley Scott films look like cinema verite.
Over time, SkyDance evolved from a well-financed vanity project with deep-pocketed foreign backers into something that looks suspiciously like a media conglomerate.
Then, the Ellison multiverse decided to turn what was a pretty compelling origin story into a quest for world domination, playing Loki to his dad’s method-acting approach to Thanos cosplay.
And it looks like no one can stop them and their plans.
Media executives love to pretend Hollywood runs on creativity. It runs on intellectual property and balance sheets. Everything else is window dressing.
Which brings us to what might be the most ambitious corporate land grab the entertainment industry has seen since someone decided owning both cable channels and the pipes delivering them was a totally reasonable idea.
Welcome to the Ellison Cinematic Universe.
If this whole saga feels less like business strategy and more like a supervillain origin story, that is because it kind of is.
The Ellison Cinematic Universe
Gotta Catch ‘Em All: Intellectual Property, Assemble
After weeks of headlines, backroom negotiations, and corporate brinkmanship, Paramount Skydance finally won its long war of attrition against Netflix, acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal reportedly valued at around $111 billion, including debt.
According to reporting from Reuters, the merger would combine a staggering list of media properties under one corporate roof: CBS, CNN, HBO, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, and enough reality television to permanently destroy several million brain cells.
This isn’t your standard industry consolidation. This is the entertainment equivalent of collecting every Infinity Stone and basically wiping out half of the competition in the process.
If regulators ultimately approve the deal, and history suggests they probably will, given Larry’s well-documented rapport and high-level access to Donald Trump, then the Ellison-backed conglomerate will end up controlling a significant portion of the global media and entertainment ecosystem.
From film schools to newsrooms, streaming services to consumer products, the merger also gives Paramount Skydance a litany of franchises that have been printing money for decades, from the DC Universe to SpongeBob (or the majority of the apparel section at Walmart).
This consolidation, by the way, doesn’t include the X factor in this aggressive bid for world domination: Larry Ellison’s highly scrutinized (yet successful) bid to acquire TikTok from Bytedance.
Not to mention, they now own the film rights to Monopoly, which seems like something of a self-own – and a pretty good look into their long term corporate strategy.
What this means for your career
If you work in entertainment, journalism, production or media marketing, expect the job market to increasingly look like a revival of the long dismantled studio system – an industry where the power is consolidated into the hands of a few companies that essentially control how the industry hires, what projects get greenlit and their respective budgets, and what the industry’s creative pipeline really looks like.
The good news here is that the larger the conglomerate, the greater the demand (and relative competition) for writers, producers, directors, marketers, and technologists; each studio will need a veritable army of talent to remain competitive and viable. The bad news? Those employers now have unprecedented leverage over pay, contracts, and working conditions – not to mention any guild signatory agreements.
Fewer owners with more power tends to lead to less independence throughout their businesses, from newsrooms to production companies to development teams. That means going forward, viable entertainment careers are going to look a lot less creative and entrepreneurial, and a whole lot more corporate.
In other words, the next few decades should look a lot more like Hollywood under the studio system; all we can do is hope that the blacklist doesn’t come back, too. Based on the Ellisons’ history, though, all signs point to a future defined more by corporate gatekeeping than creative independence.
The Silicon Valley Death Star
While many media pundits seem to be dissecting this unprecedented deal based on the historical precedents set by the entertainment industry (from Gulf Western to Vivendi to General Electric), the more prescient playbook comes not from Sunset, but instead, straight from Sand Hill Road. The Ellison Strategy, in short, seems torn directly from the pages of the standard Silicon Valley playbook.
Broken down into four basic steps, here’s the tech inspired gameplan that the Ellisons seem to already be deploying:
Step One: Identify and aggressively pursue undervalued legacy assets.
Step Two: Combine smaller acquisitions into a consolidated, centralized platform
Step Three: Control distribution through partnerships, IP protections, and license agreements
Step Four: Collect user data, figure out alternative revenue streams based on this data, and scale
This is the same precedent set by Amazon, which transformed a relatively straightforward e-commerce business into a global cloud computing giant and lucrative streaming platform. Apple, similarly, used the app store, a significant retail segment, and innovative hardware like iPhones and iPads to scale into what’s quickly becoming more of a financial services company than a technology manufacturer.
Research from the Harvard Business School investigating platform strategy shows that the key to capturing a disproportionate share of industry profits – in any industry – lies in simultaneously controlling both content and distribution.
This, in effect, is exactly what this merger creates. From film studios to broadcast networks, from streaming services to cable channels, Skydance Paramount and WBD, existing within a single corporate structure, come as close to vertical integration within the entertainment industry as we’ve seen since Paramount v. United States forced the major studios to sell their theatrical holdings all the way back in 1948. Of course, those consent decrees were formally terminated in 2020, making this level of consolidation not just possible but entirely predictable. So much for case law.
In Hollywood terms, the moment has arrived when the villain finally reveals that giant super laser they’ve been quietly building to destroy the world as we know it.
The fact that Oracle has such lucrative contracts with the Pentagon and private military contractors like Lockheed (providing the cloud computing infrastructure that powers the Pentagon and its partners as they develop next-gen AI systems) only makes this supervillain analogy a little too on-the-nose for comfort. We’re holding out for a hero… and instead, we got a nepobaby.
What this means for your career
The collision of the media and technology industries also means an increasing overlap between media and tech jobs. Roles like data science, product management, platform strategy, and algorithmic distribution now matter as much to the conglomerates as having a stable of top screenwriters, directors, or producers with first-look deals.
The entertainment workforce of the future will likely have a paucity of purely “creative” roles, instead favoring more holistic, hybrid professionals with equal fluency in both software engineering and storytelling.
If your skill set doesn’t span the divide, or your skills at content creation aren’t reinforced with fluency in data, distribution, or digital platforms, you’re likely competing for a shrinking slice of the industry that’s already facing a mass extinction event. This merger might very well be the comet that kills off these proverbial dinosaurs for good.
The Streaming Wars End in A Pyrrhic Victory
Turns Out, Cable TV Was Right.
One of the first public post-merger announcements by Paramount Skydance involved the impending merger of erstwhile streamers Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single platform. Industry reporting suggests that this new combined entity could reach roughly 200 million global subscribers, an economy of scale that neither independent entity looked capable of achieving just a few short months ago.
If you’re a fan of irony, let’s take a moment to reflect.
Just a few short years ago, every media company insisted that launching its own streaming service was the key to unlocking the digital future while providing new revenue streams and audiences for its existing IP and back catalogs; the hope was that consumers were going to happily subscribe to a dozen separate platforms, happily paying the equivalent of a second mortgage to enjoy the same variety of TV content that used to be available with a basic cable bundle (how mundane).
Instead, this only fueled the frenzy of competition between competing apps, while the industry spent billions of dollars fighting for market share – only to slowly revert back to the sort of bundles that suspiciously resemble the same sort of standard offerings that have long been a cornerstone of basic cable.
Somewhere, John Malone and Ted Turner are forlornly sipping single malt, wondering how they managed to nail the business model yet completely missed the streaming zeitgeist.
What this means for your career
The gold rush created by streaming, and the unprecedented demand for original content that came with it, ushered in what’s been widely referred to as the “Golden Age of TV” (apologies to Desilu and NBC Blue). But that era may be over. The next phase won’t be about creating quantity, but about driving efficiency.
Media companies of all sizes will be forced to prioritize fewer, larger platforms over dozens of niche services and standalone streamers. This means that fewer projects will get greenlit, less content will be produced, and execs will focus far more on franchise content and IP that reliably drives subscriptions instead of the prestige fare that so often delineated earlier streamers’ offerings.
The Deloitte Digital Media Trends survey consistently showed that audiences prefer fewer subscriptions, gravitating toward those offering major brands and franchises rather than content depth and breadth. Studios, in turn, are paying attention.
If your career is focused on original content, from writing to producing to packaging and distribution, unless you’ve got established IP, the odds of ever seeing your vision onscreen just became a whole lot worse.
That’s bad news for media and entertainment careers – and even worse news for creativity and originality. Get ready for another batch of Star Wars movies no one asked for, or some DC movies around superheroes that no one outside of a few ComicCon die-hards even knows exist.
Of course, this turned out pretty well for Deadpool.
In the meantime, the industry does actually keep hiring content and creative folks, which brings us to this week’s featured jobs on Mediabistro:
- Digital News Staff Editor and an Editorial Assistant, Recognition Programs @Inc. in NYC
- Direct Response Copywriter @ Lead Surge, Remote
- Media Marketing Manager and a Publicist @W. W. Norton & Company, Remote
- Media Relations Coordinator @Collin College, McKinney, TX
- Multimedia & Interactive Technology Faculty @Skagit Valley College, Mount Vernon, WA
- Paid Social & Digital Advertising Manager @How To Academy, Remote
- Public Affairs Research & Media Analyst @Earthjustice, Washington, DC
The Villain Never Wins.
Here’s the thing about villain origin stories.
They focus on the empire builders, the billionaires, the executives assembling giant corporate machines.
But the entertainment industry, however, ultimately runs on something much simpler.
It really comes down to stories. These are the fundamental building blocks for all creative content – and no amount of consolidation is likely to change that. At the end of the day, movies still need writers. Shows still need editors. And studios, even the corporate conglomerates, still need producers, marketers, designers, engineers, and journalists.
And no matter how advanced technology becomes, or how much tech and media careers continue to collide, take comfort in one fact: even the largest entertainment empire ever assembled can’t automate creativity.
Sure, the Ellisons are likely trying – and their controlling stake in Hollywood might even increase as the consolidation wars continue.
But the actual work of media, the part where someone makes something worth watching, still belongs to the people creating it.
That means that media and entertainment professionals are still in the picture – and still an integral part of how content gets made, distributed, consumed, and monetized.
It’s just that we’re all pretty much working for the villain now. Which should be nothing new for anyone who’s ever worked a desk at any agency in Hollywood.
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