David Zaslav Is the Real Villain of the Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger

The Ellisons are taking the heat for the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger. But David Zaslav put the studio up for sale and is walking away with a fat check.

So today we finally found out that Warner Bros. and Paramount are coming together under a new name. It’s going to be called Skydance.

The good news is that Warner Bros. and Paramount each get to keep their own studios and their own names. They’re part of the system, and they’re not being enveloped. Nobody is deleting these iconic brands. Skydance is just the new parent company name.

A lot of the hate around this deal, from myself included, has come down on the Ellison family. And for good reason. They’re uber-rich billionaires. David Ellison is a nepo baby who asked his rich dad to start funding movies, then asked his dad to buy one studio, and now a second studio. Now he owns half of Hollywood, and that’s way too much entertainment to be under a single family.

But it’s not something we haven’t seen before. The Murdochs with Fox are a great example, one that I will come back to later.

The Ellisons do deserve some of the hate. But even though I don’t like the man and what he stands for, I do think David Ellison actually likes movies. He’s funded some unique projects. Yes, a lot of it is IP, like Star Trek, Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible. But there’s been some stuff Skydance has done that I don’t think is completely horrible, and is in fact, very good.

He sounds like somebody who wants movies to be successful, wants theaters to be successful, and wants to put out 30 movies a year. He’s saying all the right things. We’ll see if he ends up doing all the right things.

The real villain is David Zaslav

But the real villain in this whole story, who isn’t getting nearly enough hate, is David Zaslav.

Zaslav took Warner Bros., which was falling apart a few years ago, and, not much to his credit, but under his leadership, they turned things around. 2025 was an incredible year for Warner Bros. One Battle After Another won Best Picture and five other Oscars. They had Sinners. They had Weapons. They had F1. These movies all made noise at the box office and during Awards Season, and they were all original movies.

They had also just kicked off DC Studios with James Gunn. They were heading in the right direction and truly becoming an industry leader again. They were the first studio to make $4 billion at the box office last year. It was all looking up.

And Zaslav will sit there and talk about how great this turnaround has been and how great his leadership has been. But the whole time, the only thing that man was thinking about was a cash-out. He was ready to put this thing up for sale once he turned it around, get his money, and get out of here. He never cared about the art or the movies.

We’re not in this situation, with Warner Bros. selling to Netflix, then getting into a bidding war, then going back to the Ellisons, without David Zaslav putting the studio up for sale. Yes, Paramount came to him first, and the board turned down three offers. But then Warner Bros. Discovery announced it was open to a sale, and once that was out in the world, it was over. If he and the board don’t put it up for sale, there’s no sale. There’s no merger. This is his fault as the leader of the company.

As much as we don’t want the nepo baby billionaires to buy movie studios, they can’t buy what isn’t for sale. They just can’t. And yes, the board has a duty to consider offers, but the board also has their own personal interests, one of which is getting super rich by selling out and not protecting the jobs of the people who work for them.

I truly don’t think David Zaslav is a guy who loves movies, or even likes movies. I think he’s a greedy executive. He didn’t take the reigns at WB with this vision of making great films and saving Warner Brothers. He took the role with a vision of a great payout, and he saw an opportunity to buy low and sell high.

And yes, he made some good decisions as a leader. Warner Bros. did some really bad things, but the projects they greenlit, especially the last two or three years, were very good. And he said: great job, guys. Now I’m going to sell you out.

Now the executives who made those decisions are getting hosed. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, who ran the film studio, are reportedly out once the deal closes.

These two deserved better.

I think James Gunn is probably the only one who survives all the firing and the layoffs. And Zaslav is walking away with a fat check, at least $550 million and as much as $887 million, not caring two cents about where Warner Bros. goes from here.

The Evidence

If you want me to back this up, here’s how I know.

Zaslav came into Warner Bros. Discovery, saw the financial position they were in, and instead of trying to make projects happen to turn things around, he canceled them for tax write-offs. Batgirl, which we never got to see. A Scooby-Doo movie called Scoob! Holiday Haunt. Coyote vs. Acme, which finally came out this year through another company, opened to $15.5 million and got great reviews. Zaslav killed it. Now whether or not these movies were going to make money is something we cannot prove, but what it does prove is that Zaslav has always been willing to sell out the art in favor of the financials.

He also pulled shows off of HBO Max, most famously Westworld. He pulled Looney Tunes and Scooby-Doo, two of the most iconic IPs, off of HBO Max. He pulled a bunch of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim shows from the service. I have to imagine it was some sort of cost-cutting measure, maybe to license them out to other people. He was stripping down his own assets just to get profits back up.

That was his job. That’s why he was brought in. He was a corporate lawyer. He worked in television at NBC, then over at Discovery, before he got in charge of Warner Bros. And he ran it like a TV station. You can cancel a TV show after eight episodes, even if they haven’t all aired. That’s how he ran things. But it’s not how the film world works.

As things turned around after the strikes and they had a great 2025, it clicked — “I bought low, so now I can sell high. If I sell, I’m going to get super rich.”

Mission accomplished.

That’s what he was there to do: make money, get rich, and go retire off into the sunset.

So what does the future look like?

So what does the future truly look like for Warner Bros. and Paramount? We don’t really know. But I do have more faith in this than what happened with Disney and Fox, where Disney basically gutted Fox. 20th Century Fox was a great studio. Now 20th Century Studios puts out a few movies a year. Searchlight does a couple each year. I hate the Disney-Fox merger more than I hate this one, because of the way they gutted those iconic studios and their creative teams.

I don’t think that happens here, because Warner and Paramount get to remain their own things, and they each need to put out 15 movies a year to hit the 30 theatrical releases that are being required as part of the merger agreement with a dozen states attorney generals. They have a lot of work to do.

I also don’t know how much David Ellison’s politics will truly affect what they put out. This is where I come back to the Murdoch family, which is staunchly conservative and Republican. When they owned FX, they put out all the Ryan Murphy shows which were always heavily LGBTQ-themed, and shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia which directly criticize their politics. Their studio put out movies like Love, Simon, 12 Years A Slave, and Hidden Figures. That was all stuff that goes against their agenda and social/political views. But at the end of the day, they care about money. Money is more important than politics and more important than all of their morals.

The Ellison family is the same way. They might have their own politics and their own morals, but if something tells them there’s money, those go out the window. These guys are billionaires. They live for money. It is their blood. It is their oxygen. The only reason they’re so involved in politics right now is because that’s where the money is. If we have a new president from a different party in a few years, they’ll go play to those people. You saw it with the tech bros at Facebook and Amazon. They’ll play to whoever’s in charge to make themselves wealthier.

What worries me more about this deal is how much is in it. Disney got 20th Century Fox, FX, and a larger stake in Hulu. They didn’t get Fox News, the regional sports stations, and any regional news stations

This amount of media control by one company is absurd.

In this deal, Skydance is picking up CBS and CNN and fifteen different major American cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago - plus influence over hundreds of local affiliates under the CBS banner. They get HBO and its streaming service as a whole. They get dozens of super valuable IPs like Harry Potter, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, and Cartoon Network. They own too much, in my opinion. It’s definitely not a good thing.

There are worse situations. This could have been sold to Netflix, and it probably would have been more diluted. The more I think about that potential deal, the worse I think it could have been. I imagine Mr. Beast hosting an economics segment on CNN or some other ridiculous clickbait — can’t you see it?

Maybe the Ellisons will still completely mess this up. Maybe in three to five years it falls apart. We don’t know where any of this is going to go, and there is no real precedent for a media merger of this size.

But none of it happens without David Zaslav. He’s the villain here. He’s the bad guy. He’s the sellout. When so many of your executives have done great work and you’ve greenlit so many great original movies, and you sell out 100% to get a paycheck, that’s the ultimate sellout move. And he’s not taking nearly as much heat as he should.