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Paramount’s cable business has cratered. The news division is in turmoil. A.I. is coming for movies. And those are just the obvious challenges facing David Ellison as he takes control.
July 25, 2025Updated 3:45 p.m. ET
After 19 torturous months of wrangling, appeasing, jockeying, promising and placating, David Ellison has finally won government approval to buy Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, MTV and Hollywood’s oldest movie studio.
Now comes the hard part.
Mr. Ellison, 41, has vowed to take the venerable but troubled media assets and overhaul them for the TikTok age. He wants to exorcise the ghosts of glory days gone by — to rid the company of this-is-how-we-have-always-done-it thinking — and create a media-technology hybrid that can compete with Netflix, YouTube and whatever the artificial intelligence revolution has in store.
New Paramount will be “the pace car for how these incumbent legacy media businesses will need to be run in the future,” Gerry Cardinale, one of Mr. Ellison’s backers, said when the $8 billion deal was announced last year.
To achieve his goal, Mr. Ellison will need to do things that Hollywood hates.
Fat expense accounts? Armies of consultants? Gone. Most of Mr. Ellison’s financial backing comes from his father, Larry Ellison, the tech magnate and one of the richest people in the world. But the Ellisons have shown a lack of tolerance for Hollywood largess. As chief executive of what he has referred to as New Paramount, David Ellison plans to slash and burn through Paramount Global divisions to find more than $2 billion in “cost efficiencies and synergies.”
Chris McCarthy, Paramount’s top cable and streaming executive, has already been squeezed out. (He made $19.5 million last year, according to regulatory filings.) Also expected to leave: Brian Robbins, who has led Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon since 2021. (He made $19.6 million last year.)
At the same time, Mr. Ellison plans to enthusiastically embrace technology, including artificial intelligence. So far, Hollywood studios — deeply resistant to change — have mostly taken a plodding approach to A.I. because of concerns about how the software is built, how copyright holders are compensated and how unions might react.
