For the Redstone clan, the end with Paramount Pictures came much as it began 31 years ago – victory achieved after a long, bitter and highly public fight over a Hollywood institution.
This time around, the win for Shari Redstone was securing the ability to sell Paramount Pictures, CBS, Paramount+, MTV, Nickelodeon and other legacy cablers to David Ellison’s Skydance Media. The battle came at great cost, especially for CBS.
Skydance paid about $8 billion in total for Paramount Global. In 1994 — after a 10-month slog of outmaneuvering rival suitors that include Barry Diller, QVC, John Malone and then-powerful telco BellSouth – Sumner Redstone closed the deal for Paramount Pictures alone at $9.5 billion – that’s $19.5 billion in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation.
A generation ago, Sumner Redstone was manifestly energized and emboldened by the obstacles that he overcame to secure his prize of owning one of Hollywood’s foundational studios. For his daughter Shari Redstone, the handover to Skydance Media came with far less fanfare. And it came five years nearly to the day after Sumner Redstone’s death at 97.
The company that Skydance just bought is endowed with sui generis assets – most notably, Paramount Pictures and CBS, brands that have been part of the nation’s media fabric for more than a century. They are irreplicable. But the company that ended its run as Paramount Global has been hobbled the macroeconomic changes that have rocked all of media and entertainment. None have been more disrupted than the legacy studios that defined Hollywood’s first century. And none more so, for so many reasons, than Paramount Global.
The timing of the sale brings a bookend to the decade that Shari Redstone spent cleaning up the very big mess made by her father in his waning years at the helm of his Viacom empire. Sumner Redstone, who started out with a chain movie theaters in New England, acquired CBS in 2000 and put it under the Viacom umbrella. Six years after that, Sumner changed his mind and decided Viacom and CBS should operate separately, albeit both under his firm control.
Sumner Redstone’s journey to buy Paramount Pictures was just starting when he struck the deal in September 1993. The pricetag would climb by more than $1 billion after the bidding wars were done.
Shari Redstone came back into the picture in a big way in the fall of 2015 when her 90-something father went into physical decline at Beverly Park compound. By many accounts — including the excellent reportage in the 2023 book “Unscripted” by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams — Shari stepped into a storyline worthy of “Dallas” or “Dynasty.” Scheming girlfriends, questionable business partners, a fleet of lawyers and consultants gorging themselves on fees and a whole lot of other jockeying around Sumner Redstone’s fortune and his business empire. With all of this internal drama, it was no wonder at all that Paramount began to suffer from neglect and a lack of vision.
LISTEN: A Deep Look at Paramount Pictures — What’s Next for the House That Adolph Zukor Built and David Ellison Just Bought (“Daily Variety” podcast)
Shari Redstone’s methodical march through the obstacles in her way to sorting out the future of her family’s empire is now a significant part of the Redstone family legend. (See this timeline we published in 2016 on the events of the preceeding 12 months.) In that process, Shari became convinced that she needed to reunite Viacom and CBS for the sake of the company. She achieved this in 2019, steering around more than a few roadblocks. Those included the fierce opposition of former CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, before he was forced out in 2018 amid a wave of sexual harassment allegations from his past.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s crystal clear that CBS would have been better off remaining on its own, if only to be a more attractive acquisition target to a strategic buyer. I know I’m not the only one in the biz who wonders about what the industry landscape would look like today if Time Warner had acquired CBS circa 2016, rather than selling itself to AT&T.
Now, after enduring another Shakespearean drama cycle involving President Trump, “60 Minutes” and an FCC chief on a MAGA mission, Shari Redstone has handed the keys to the new ownership regime led by David Ellison.
Ellison, not unlike Sumner Redstone, has skillfully parlayed his Skydance Media into the vehicle to acquire a much larger concern. Part of what he bought was Shari Redstone’s iron-clad control of Paramount Global. David Ellison and his father, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison own about 70% of the equity in the newly minted Paramount Skydance, and they control 100% of the voting power. The Melrose lot is the Ellisons’ playground now.
The Ellison family had the resources to help CBS stand tall against the meritless lawsuit against “60 Minutes” that President Trump used to pummel the company over the past year. They could’ve have stood up for the veracity of the content that Sumner Redstone prized so much that he famously declared “Content is King.” Not this time. To pave the way for FCC approval, Paramount Global wrote Trump a $16 million check to settle the suit. As a lifelong CBS News viewer, it’s been hard to watch the mighty Eye be left bruised by business imperatives.
After formally closing the deal on Aug. 7, David Ellison made his first stop as the new boss to CBS News’ operations on West 57th Street. That was a smart move, for optics and otherwise. It shows Team Ellison recognizes the severity of what’s transpired for CBS News.
As a new King of Content takes the Paramount throne, here’s hoping Ellison understands the lessons to be learned from Paramount and CBS’ recent past, now that he’s entrusted with guiding their futures.
(Pictured top: Sumner Redstone, Shari Redstone and David Ellison)
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