Paramount May Usher In a Big Change to Hollywood’s Ruling Class

Family offices have long been part of Hollywood’s DNA, quietly shaping its most iconic moments and technological progress. Paramount Pictures was one of Hollywood’s first family-controlled studios under business titan Adolph Zukor, who developed the vertical integration approach, ensuring that ambitious films like Wings (1927), the first Oscar winner, got the resources and distribution they needed to succeed.

The recent David Ellison–Paramount Global deal is a prime example of how private wealth is returning to Hollywood to once again play a pivotal role in shaping Hollywood’s future with a blend of technology, creativity and flexible capital. Family offices now command financial firepower on par with the world’s largest media giants (the Ellison family’s net worth currently sits around $200 billion — greater than the market cap of Comcast and on par with that of Disney), but unlike those media giants, family offices can make billion dollar decisions via text based on their business and creative instincts. 

With the entertainment industry undergoing an overall business model transformation with the advent of streaming and digital disruption, as well as changing consumer behavior, family office capital has many advantages compared to institutional capital, which is constrained by its very nature. To wit, institutional capital has formal and rigid management structures, restrictions on the types securities/investments allowed, timing and duration limitations on capital invested, requirements for management fees and other performance fees, financial metrics that must be met, regulatory compliance and reporting, complex formalities including voting and approval structures that slow things down and lead to unpredictable outcomes depending on ever-changing leadership teams. 

Conversely, family offices think generationally, are nimble and are not subject to any of those constraints, making them a solid fit for an industry undergoing change and requiring fast, easy, flexible solutions. Any operator who has led an organization through a turbulent market with misaligned short-term quarter-to-quarter capital knows the burden it can have on creativity, as the executive team is often afraid to make bold choices for fear of not delivering on predictable results or they are simply not allowed to proceed, which creates real frustration internally and leads to a crisis of corporate culture.

We are witnessing an unprecedented shift in global wealth dynamics, and with it, a surge in family office influence such as the Ellisons. As of May 2024, the global family office market comprised approximately 4,500 single-family offices (SFOs) and 2,500 multi-family offices (MFOs), collectively managing $4.77 trillion and $6.65 trillion in assets, respectively, according to With Intelligence and the Highworth Family Offices Database (which is more AUM than the entire private equity industry). However, these figures only account for discoverable family offices; many operate discreetly, making it difficult to gauge their true scale. With total AUM projected to surpass $11.41 trillion by 2026, family offices are poised to become even more dominant forces in global finance, influencing everything from venture capital to the entertainment industry.

As one of the world’s largest family offices, Hollywood is rallying behind Ellison, an investor deeply immersed in the creative process and known for being talent-friendly. Ellison’s production company, Skydance Media, has produced a mix of original and franchise content, showcasing his commitment to artistic risk-taking and an understanding of storytelling that resonates with global audiences. Dean Devlin, Ellison’s former collaborator on Flyboys, hailed him as a “creative first” powerhouse who founded Skydance to prioritize art over profits. Jeff Shell, soon-to-be Paramount president, described him as someone uniquely positioned at the crossroads of innovation and artistry. Ellison is known for his collaborative partnerships with filmmakers such as Tom Cruise, which may test the limits of any budget conscious studio executive, yet which have paid huge dividends in success. 

Ellison is not alone in this shift toward family office influence and capital in Hollywood. Bernard Arnault ($154 billion net worth), CEO of LVMH, launched 22 Montaigne Entertainment to challenge Hollywood’s creative stagnation, while the Pinault family office ($40 billion net worth) acquired a majority stake in CAA, one of Hollywood’s leading talent agencies (which also recently launched a “Family Office Practice”).

Some recent box office successes had family office capital behind them, including Teddy Schwarzman’s Black Bear Pictures with A Working Man (No. 1 at the box office), and billionaire Steven Rales’s Indian Paintbrush, which won awards for Conclave which has exploded in popularity with the election of Pope Leo XIV (luck or billionaire insight – you decide). Eldridge Industries co-founder and CEO Todd Boehly, through his stake in independent entertainment company A24, has underwritten daring projects like Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Whale — films that might have never seen the light of day in today’s blockbuster-driven studio system, yet went on to earn critical and commercial success. (Boehly’s Eldridge Industries also has an ownership stake in The Hollywood Reporter.) Similarly, Dan Friedkin’s Imperative Entertainment helped bankroll Martin Scorsese’s $200 million opus Killers of the Flower Moon, a gamble few studios today would dare attempt.

Some of recent decades’ most critically acclaimed and culturally significant films also owe their existence to family office-backed capital. RatPac Entertainment, co-founded by Australian billionaire James Packer, is a striking example. RatPac’s investments helped bring to life films like The Revenant (2015) and Bridge of Spies (2015), both of which earned widespread critical acclaim and swept major awards circuits — together contributing to an impressive haul of 59 Academy Award nominations and 25 wins. Backed by South Korea’s Lee family (Samsung), CJ ENM has also proven how patient, family office capital can uplift meaningful stories with global resonance, including Parasite, Decision to Leave, and The Admiral: Roaring Currents. With a content budget approaching a billion dollars in 2025, CJ ENM is certain to create more globally recognized cinematic achievements.

Equally important are the billionaires who find meaningful cultural impact in their Hollywood investments. Participant Media, founded by billionaire Jeff Skoll, showed how private capital can fuel stories that matter and shape culture. Skoll-backed films earned 86 Academy Award nominations and 21 wins, including best picture triumphs with Green Book and Spotlight, and documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth, before Participant ceased operations in April 2024. Skoll, long regarded as one of Hollywood’s most creatively driven billionaires, championed passion projects alongside the likes of George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Matt Damon. By any measure, Skoll achieved more in terms of creative impact-driven cinema than any billionaire before him — and that legacy deserves celebration. Skoll was truly Roosevelt’s “Man In The [Hollywood] Arena,” and with more than $5 billion in net worth remaining after his Hollywood sojourn, a comfortable retirement still appears assured. 

In an era where AI is shaping every industry, Ellison is uniquely positioned to lead Paramount’s transformation and his forward-looking vision is already underway. On an investor call, he laid out plans to double down on core competencies with a “creative first” mindset. With his Oracle pedigree, Ellison plans to make New Paramount (as the merged company will be known) a “tech hybrid” that leverages cloud-based production and generative AI, ensuring that operational efficiency and creative expression grow in tandem to redefine modern filmmaking. Ellison will be tasked with leadership decisions at Paramount Networks and CBS. Those moves require patient, visionary capital capable of weathering the early days of the inevitable J curve without fear of changing direction in the face of quarterly pressures.

Ellison’s rise offers Hollywood a much-needed course correction in an industry where financial engineering often trumps creative ambition. Ellison’s vision, if realized, could dismantle Hollywood’s addiction to safe bets and reignite a culture of risk-taking and bold decision making — the kind that birthed Chinatown and The Godfather. The merger, already cleared by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the European Commission, is now poised to clear its final hurdle with the Federal Communications Commission. Let’s all hope that President Trump and FCC chairman Brendan Carr promptly approve the deal and restore creativity in Hollywood, so we can all go back to the movies. 

Republished with permission. The original article, "Paramount May Usher In a Big Change to Hollywood’s Ruling Class (Guest Column)," was published in The Hollywood Reporter on May 20, 2025.