The ascent of David Ellison, the ‘Top Gun’ billionaire buying up Hollywood
David Ellison in the 2006 film Fly Boys
Hollywood isn’t kind to the children of billionaires who want to be famous. Oil dynasty scion Balthazar Getty’s career started well with his performance as Ralph in 1990’s Lord of the Flies, but since then the leading roles have been scarce. Comedian Nick Kroll, the son of corporate investigators Kroll Inc founder Jules, is voicing animated films such as the Bob’s Burgers Movie and had a minor role in the 2022 Harry Styles misfire Don’t Worry Darling. Nicola Peltz, daughter of anti-woke Disney investor Nelson Peltz, has been lambasted for directing herself in the “poverty porn” movie Lola.
And then there’s David Ellison – son of Silicon Valley mogul and Oracle founder Larry Ellison – who was locked in exclusive takeover talks for Paramount, home to Top Gun and Mission: Impossible, owner of Channel 5, MTV, Paramount+ and the CBS network until last week, and is now scrambling to prop up a deal that is on increasingly shaky ground.
His Hollywood adventure started with a somewhat spotty acting career and some questionable producing decisions (remember Geostorm, anyone?). His company, Skydance was built with his father’s billions and despite waging a month-long PR campaign around his bid, as well as being Tom Cruise’s co-producer on both the Mission: Impossible franchise and Top Gun: Maverick, he has so far persuaded few senior Hollywood figures to publicly back him.
In April, Ellison’s offer for Skydance to buy out Paramount’s majority shareholder Shari Redstone by acquiring her company National Amusements – which owns 77 per cent of Paramount’s voting stock – for $3 billion was attractive enough to Redstone that she gave him a 30-day exclusive negotiating period.
The rest of the company’s shareholders resisted the deal – and Sony and private equity firm Apollo Global Management offered a rival $26 billion bid to buy all the shares, not just Shari’s, which obviously impressed the non-Shari shareholders. Despite frantically calling around Hollywood to get big names to recommend his offer, Ellison has only so far secured backing from his own agent Ari Emmanuel and director James Cameron. The smart money seems to be on the enormous amount of money put up by Sony, the longtime Hollywood player.
Ellison seems to be discovering the truth of eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll’s 2013 anecdote in an interview with Forbes. When Skoll started his documentary studio Participant Media in 2004, he said, LA people told him: “The surest way to become a millionaire is to start as a billionaire and go into the movie business. The streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people who thought they were going to make movies in this town.” In April, Skoll closed Participant Media. He’d lost close to half a billion dollars.
Tom Cruise, David Ellison and his fellow producer Dana Goldberg at the 2013 LA premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness – Getty
Ellison does have an awful lot of money – at least in his trust fund he does. His father’s gift of 90,000 Oracle shares to the fund when he floated the company in 1986 made David hugely wealthy from a very young age. He’s a keen pilot and owns at least two aeroplanes and one helicopter – he told GQ this accounts for his clean-living lifestyle. Traces of drugs or alcohol in his blood would mean he’d lose his aerobatics licence. He drives a Ferrari, lives in a beach house in Malibu and absolutely does not talk about any of that stuff, preferring to be taken seriously as a business leader.
David’s parents split when he was three years old. His mother largely raised him and his sister Megan – who is in movies via her company Annapurna Pictures, producing Zero Dark 30, American Hustle, House of Gucci and this years animated Oscar’s contender Nimona – on a horse farm in Woodside, California, one of America’s richest small towns. He told one interviewer that she only gave him a $5 a week allowance and made sure he did his chores as well as his homework.
But one thing he did with his billionaire father was learn to pilot a light aeroplane. Ellison Snr decided that flying would teach his son responsibility, although David’s love of daredevil stunt flying ultimately lead to him quitting film school and heading to Tinseltown. Dad hoped Jnr would go into business but the lad wanted to be famous, a star of the screen.
Ellison’s acting career was less than stellar – which is why indie site MovieWeb’s feature on the Skydance/Paramount deal was headlined “the Future of Paramount Rests in the Hands of a Z-List Actor.” 2006’s Flyboys, starring James Franco and focussing on WWI pilots, flopped with an $17 million box office against a $60 million budget… most of which came from his dad’s coffers. “Whenever a rich newcomer puts money into a bomb, the sharks start to circle,” according to Hollywood Reporter editor-at-large Kim Masters. “That this newcomer was a young man who wanted to act only made the sharks swim faster.”
David Ellison promoting Top Gun: Maverick in London, May 2022 – Getty
After a few more films came and went – Hole in One, a comedy about a male student raising money to remove his breast implants, and a small part in the small movie Little Fish, Strange Pond – he turned to producing, with the help of mentors Steve Jobs and David Geffen, provided by his father.
“He tried to buy his way into acting but then had to settle on bankrolling Paramount films – this has been up and down but that’s the film game,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis.
Ellison launched Skydance in 2009 with a four-year co-financing, production and distribution agreement with Paramount which included Ellison committing to co-financing the next Mission: Impossible, the Jack Ryan reboot and the film that would become Top Gun: Maverick. The first fruit of the deal, however, was the Coen Brothers remake of John Wayne’s classic Western True Grit. Jeff Bridges played Wayne’s “Rooster” Coburn and Hailee Steinfeld played Mattie, the 14-year-old farm girl hiring muscle to avenge her father. It was an auspicious start – the film is the second highest grossing western after Dances with Wolves and it picked up 10 Oscar nominations.
He earned a reputation for being “detailed and focussed if profligate,” according to one producer. “He reads the scripts and does the homework, and he wants to build a long-term business, but he makes a few odd choices.” These included his attempts to branch out from under the Paramount deal’s wings – the flop sci-fi Gemini Man starring Will Smith, Geostorm, about weather satellites attacking Earth, and his personal attempt to reboot the Terminator franchise with the dyslexic-challenging, Terminator Genisys (2015).
He also caused a post-MeToo row by hiring Pixar co-founder John Lasseter to head up his animation studio just months after the former Disney chief creative officer had stepped down amid complaints about inappropriate workplace hugging – the Wall Street Journal had shadowed Lasseter for a day in 2011 and was surprised, even then, by the 48 hugs he doled out to willing and unwilling colleagues alike. Lasseter later issued an apology “to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of an unwanted hug”.
Ellison issued a memo noting Lasseter’s admitted mistakes and his apology, explaining that he had not gone into the decision lightly and that John had assured him he would “comport himself in a wholly professional manner”.
Lasseter helped forge a relationship between Skydance and Apple that flourished into a February 2022 “put deal,” an increasingly rare Hollywood arrangement where a distributor or streamer agrees to release the films a producer hands over, whatever they are.
Larry Ellison at the America’s Cup in Bermuda, 2017
A few other players – Jason Blum’s Blumhouse, Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw and Arnon Milchan’s New Regency – have similar pacts, although none as generous as Skydance/Apple. Ellison’s company is guaranteed at least two fully financed feature films per year with budgets up to roughly $125 million and guaranteed a pay-out of up to $25 million per picture. Keeping this deal in place may be one reason he bid to buy Paramount.
It may seem a crazy way of securing a contract, but the Ellisons aren’t known for cautious spending. Larry once tried to import a decommissioned Russian MiG-29, has mansions in San Francisco, Palm Beach, Lake Tahoe, Newport and bought 98 per cent of the Hawaiian island Lanai for $300 million in 2012. Shortly after he bought the island’s airline. David launched his Lanai clothing line to celebrate, because that’s what devoted sons do, and he invited Tom Cruise to stay regularly.
Larry set about making changes on the island pretty quickly. Finding the local food “inedible,” one of the first things he did was build a Nobu then added a Four Seasons resort, a luxury spa called Sensei Retreat and is planning to make the island into a self-sustaining “health utopia” according to an interview with Forbes. It’s this kind of thinking that prompts Harrington to point out that “whether the deal is any good is sort of immaterial.”
David clearly wants the studio despite movies being “a boom or bust sector that is difficult to model or have confidence in – especially now,” Harrington adds. “These sorts of acquisitions can appear irrational. It’s pretty doubtful he will have any interest in CBS, Channel 5, Network 10 etc which could have wider ramifications across the different markets.”
This “irrational acquisition” life choice makes Ellison the personification of Silicon Valley’s unexpected genuflection when it comes to Hollywood. California’s tech sector spent decades absorbing and remaking industries like property, travel, taxis and the music industry in its own image. When the streamers came for Hollywood, however, the disruption model faltered. Gradually weekly episodes, live sports and network sitcoms have pushed out which were edgy dramas dropped online all at once. Movies, too, are finding that the straight-to-streaming model is a busted flush.
David Ellison at the 2018 premiere of Mission: Impossible – Fallout – Getty
“Streamers have always argued that straight-to-streaming movie exclusivity was valuable,” explains the anonymous industry blogger the Entertainment Strategy Guy. “That’s the basic bet of Netflix, Apple and Amazon. But when I worked at a major streamer, I had plenty of data telling me that theatrical films crushed straight-to-streaming films in terms of performance, viewership, interest, and more. Given that theatrical films also, you know, make money from box office receipts as well, in general, they make more money than films released only in one window.”
Is this deal David’s attempt to step out from his father’s shadow? They’ve already parted ways politically – David has donated $1 billion to Biden’s campaign all told, while Larry isn’t bankrolling Trump this time round but has supported him in the past. But he’s finding, like the rest of the Valley, that movie people are movie people.
Ellison still has a fighting chance. Some in Hollywood would prefer Paramount remain independent having watched 20th Century Fox disappear into Disney. Sony snapping Paramount up would probably have the same effect. David Ellison, the “Z-List Actor”, may be Paramount’s only hope.
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