David Ellison Is Very Bullish On AI’s Creative Potential

In his first earnings call as CEO at the helm of both Paramount and Warner Bros., David Ellison talked up his merged Hollywood empire as a tech-forward enterprise — and part of that tightrope walk included an embrace of AI while also dismissing “AI slop.”

It’s a two-step that’s not necessarily an easy one. The technology is widely seen as a harbinger of doom for Hollywood’s traditional workflows (i.e. building sets, shooting with real background extras, going on-location, etc) while also being increasingly adapted and integrated into the business (see: Ben Affleck’s VFX firm, which has helped Netflix use AI on 300-plus titles so far, while supposedly preserving the things that make Hollywood, Hollywood).

Ellison told analysts that he expects AI to help his company’s studios make content faster and cheaper, likening the technology as the biggest breakthrough in the industry since CGI effects went mainstream. Skydance plans to spend $30 billion annually across its content portfolio — that’s includes everything from prestige TV HBO projects to CBS procedurals and MTV reality shows as well as NFL sports rights and features at Warners and Paramount.

“I don’t think it can be discounted how fast this technology is moving,” Ellison said after table-setting by saying that “in a world of AI slop we think there will always be a premium for truly hand-crafted storytelling.”

Ellison has a unique lens into the issue as heir to his father Larry Ellison’s AI-powered Oracle tech fortune, which is a key facet of his effort to rebrand legacy Hollywood studios as a tech-centric venture.

The CEO also views franchise IP — he described his empire as having 40 $1 billion franchises — as a moat protecting against the onslaught of AI content, delivering more premium experiences to his 203 million-plus subscribers at a soon-to-be merged Paramount+ and HBO Max.

He then launched into an anecdote about a franchise that his Skydance Media has rebooted multiple times over the past two decades.

“AI really has the potential to be the biggest creative unlock in modern history. The last time we saw anything close to this was really the advent of CGI and digital composites in the early ’90s. That technology gave birth to amazing stories like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. It’s hard to imagine that AI is not going to have a more significant impact than that. I personally believe that’s going to be an incredible unlock on creativity.”

“If you go back in time, speaking of Terminator which everyone knows is one of my favorites, if you go back to ’83, when James Cameron made that movie it was made for $4 million,” Ellison noted. “If you wanted to make that picture today shot-for-shot, it’d be $60 million-$70 million.”

The CEO added: “There’s not a lot of bets that get taken like that across our industry. And we think these tools will help unlock more original storytelling by being able to make the budgets more digestible to take that amount of risk.”

Skydance is looking to find some $6 billion in cost-synergies from merging Paramount and Warner Bros. And part of that, in addition to finding redundancies in corporate overhead, real estate and facilities as well as consolidating back office and corporate functions is scaling AI-workflows across the combined company.

To-be-determined on how that will ultimately impact production. As Ellison noted to the Wall Street crowd, he doesn’t have a crystal ball but believes that “productivity will improve as a result.”