SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Hollywood's biggest drama has not been playing in theaters. It's the on, then off, now on-again deal over the last major studio operating in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The $8 billion deal would merge the parent company of Paramount, the film and TV studios, the Paramount+ streaming service, the CBS broadcast network with a relative newcomer, Skydance Media. Kim Masters has been following the deal. She's editor-at- large of the Hollywood Reporter and hosts The Business on KCRW. She joins us, of course, from Los Angeles. Kim, thanks for being with us.
KIM MASTERS, BYLINE: My pleasure, Scott.
SIMON: Why is this deal so significant, particularly given the tough times the industry is facing?
MASTERS: Yeah. The tough times are really the issue here. We are seeing the major studios challenged, like never before. We have Netflix, which is basically eating Hollywood's lunch right now. So the major studios are starting to go away. We saw Fox just consumed by Disney. Paramount has been in a lot of trouble. It's considered not big enough to compete in this world. Its stock has been dropping. And what old-school Hollywood, at least, is hoping and praying is that someone would keep the Paramount studio alive. And that is the promise that young David Ellison, who runs Skydance, made to Shari Redstone, who controlled Paramount's fate.
SIMON: He's been called the millennial mogul. What's his background?
MASTERS: He is the son of one Larry Ellison, whom you might have heard of.
SIMON: Larry Ellison, of course, one of the founders of Oracle.
MASTERS: He was basically, you know, arriving in Hollywood with a few billion dollars to spend -always gets Hollywood's attention. So he came in quite young. His father, Larry, was concerned about that. I don't think that he had a particularly close relationship with his dad when he was a child, but now they seem to be working together. You know, David came in, and he made this deal with Paramount where he was allowed to or got the chance to invest in big movies, "Mission Impossible" and "Top Gun." So that was very good.
Stuff he did on his own sometimes didn't work out so well. He tried to revive the "Terminator" movies, and that went very badly. So there's a lot of ups and downs, and you can lose a lot of money very quickly in Hollywood. I mean, I'm sure it's like a young boy's dream to buy a studio and run it. It's a very complicated deal. It's not resolved yet, but they stuck it out for a long time when there were other offers coming or when Shari Redstone got mad at them and told them to go away. They kept wagering that they would be the last one standing, and they are, so they now are in this deal.
SIMON: Well, what ultimately made the deal attractive to Shari Redstone?
MASTERS: Money, partly, and partly that promise that he'd keep the company together. But there's also the fact that this is her father's company, this empire that her father, Sumner Redstone, built. And that is an emotional thing. Now, can you keep that company together? No, not really. Some things are going to have to be sold. It's going to have to be reshaped.
David Ellison has talked to the press and to investors, and he's also really emphasized the tech aspect. He's going to make this a sort of hybrid company. It's old-school, and it's tech. Shari also, you know, is expecting lawsuits. She demanded as part of the deal some indemnity from the shareholder lawsuits that were certain to follow.
SIMON: Any feeling for what difference this might make in terms of what people actually see?
MASTERS: Not yet. David's plans are not that clear. He has a lot of problems to deal with with this company. They have a lot of cable channels - MTV, Nickelodeon. Those channels are shriveling away. So he has to decide what to do with these assets. And that's assuming - you know, this won't close for probably a year. There's a period where other potential buyers could jump in. Several have expressed interest but seem to have faded away. And then there's a regulatory review.
In that time, there are three CEOs running this company. So it will sort of be David Ellison behind the scenes without the deal closed, but three CEOs looking at their future boss and getting direction, probably, about what to sell and what to do. It's going to be a huge, huge challenge for anyone to make this thing work. But I think we'll start to see moves even when the deal isn't officially closed.
SIMON: Kim Masters of member station KCRW. Thanks so much for being with us.
MASTERS: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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