{"id":911993,"date":"2026-11-10T04:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T04:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/911993\/"},"modified":"2026-11-10T04:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T04:20:09","slug":"david-ellison-is-very-bullish-on-ais-creative-potential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/911993\/","title":{"rendered":"David Ellison Is Very Bullish On AI\u2019s Creative Potential"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn 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 \u2014 and part of that tightrope walk included an embrace of AI<\/a> while also dismissing \u201cAI slop.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a two-step that\u2019s not necessarily an easy one. The technology is widely seen as a harbinger of doom for Hollywood\u2019s 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\u2019s VFX firm, which has helped Netflix use AI on 300-plus<\/a> titles so far, while supposedly preserving the things that make Hollywood, Hollywood). <\/p>\n

\n\tEllison told analysts that he expects AI to help his company\u2019s studios make content faster and cheaper, describing the technology as the biggest breakthrough in the industry since CGI effects went mainstream. Skydance<\/a> plans to spend $30 billion annually across its content portfolio \u2014 that 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t think it can be discounted how fast this technology is moving,\u201d Ellison said after table-setting by saying that \u201cin a world of AI slop we think there will always be a premium for truly hand-crafted storytelling.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tEllison has a unique lens into the issue as heir to his father Larry Ellison\u2019s AI-powered Oracle tech fortune, which is a key facet of his effort to rebrand legacy Hollywood studios as a tech-centric venture. (To that point, the enterprise cloud apps of Oracle Fusion got a call out in the earnings call as well when talking about consolidating back office functions.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe CEO also views franchise IP \u2014 he described his empire as having 40 $1 billion franchises \u2014 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tHe then launched into an anecdote about a franchise that his Skydance Media has rebooted multiple times over the past two decades. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAI really has the potential to be the biggest creative unlock in modern history,\u201d Ellison bullishly said. \u201cThe last time we saw anything close to this was really the advent of CGI and digital composites in the early \u201990s. That technology gave birth to amazing stories like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. It\u2019s hard to imagine that AI is not going to have a more significant impact than that. I personally believe that\u2019s going to be an incredible unlock on creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf you go back in time, speaking of Terminator which everyone knows is one of my favorites, if you go back to \u201983, when James Cameron made that movie it was made for $4 million,\u201d Ellison noted. \u201cIf you wanted to make that picture today shot-for-shot, it\u2019d be $60 million-$70 million.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThe CEO added: \u201cThere\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCameron, who directed the original Arnold Schwarzenegger feature as well as its acclaimed sequel, has been one of the CEO\u2019s biggest backers (and an early \u201cTeam Ellison\u201d advocate as Skydance was fighting Netflix for its Warner Bros. prize). The Avatar helmer has himself been on the vanguard of the technology, with his Lightstorm banner just buying<\/a> an AI-driven 3D post-production firm in September.<\/p>\n

\n\tSkydance is also looking to bake in an AI productivity narrative as it looks to find some $6 billion in cost-synergies from merging Paramount and Warner Bros. In addition to finding redundancies in corporate overhead, real estate and facilities as well as consolidating back office and corporate functions, those efficiencies include scaling AI-workflows across the combined company. That includes merging Paramount+ and HBO Max within a year, which Ellison described as an \u201cambitious target\u201d that is \u201cpossible because of the latest tools in artificial intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his first earnings call as CEO at the helm of both Paramount and Warner Bros., David Ellison…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":911994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[182,88,3094],"class_list":["post-911993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ai","tag-entertainment","tag-skydance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=911993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/911994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=911993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=911993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=911993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}