Key industry insights, every Sunday—exclusively for enterprise subscribers.
The Smart Take: Is Larry Ready to Be the Paramount Whisperer?
Good morning PRO Enterprise subscribers,
The news recently that Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison ascended once again to become the world's second richest person ($244 billion, behind Elon Musk) was a new reminder of the billionaire class' growing role in media.
Ellison is the main backer of the Skydance bid to take over Paramount, reaching for pocket change that amounted to $6 billion, to back the bid. His son David will be running the company if and when the controversial merger is finally approved. But nobody really believes father Larry will hand over the check and walk away. Columbia University professor and corporate watcher John Coffee has said Ellison will have "latent power."
Some might see latent power as an oxymoron. Power is power, right? But will Ellison, a pal of President Trump, follow the disappointing path of other media-owning billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Patrick Soon-Shiong at the LA Times? They all came into the business with a savior's glow but in quick order exhibited a willful disregard for a free press by scurrying to placate the president.
Ellison, 80, makes a lot of headlines as a bon vivant, owning an Hawaiian island, racing in the America's Cup, accumulating luxury cars, on and on — and as a veteran of six marriages.
The Bronx-born Ellison has since the late '70s built a successful software company with a $590 billion market cap but has been criticized as a ruthless, unbending leader. David will no doubt lean on father, and father will no doubt relish this role in the glare of Hollywood's glitz.
The Ellisons, as the latest billionaire entrants into media and entertainment, will be fascinating to cover, but let's not get ahead of ourselves —first, Larry will need to exercise some of that latent power to convince his BFF at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave to give his deal the go-ahead.
Have a great week.
Tom Lowry
SVP, Editorial Strategy
tom.lowry@thewrap.com
Your Data Playbook
1. Comic Books Losing Special Powers — As newer categories like toys and games are added to Hollywood's IP pool of offerings for TV and movies, an old staple is losing share. Comic books as a share of total IP premiering each year has plummeted from 10% to 5% since 2017, according to an article we posted last week from our partner Parrot Analytics.
Manga, on the other hand, has seen a considerable run-up over the same eight-year period, accounting for around 18% of new IP releases.
But, of course, the winner is tried and true books 📖, still accounting for about a third of all IP premieres.
2. Consumers Have Spoken: New data out last week show that social media has overtaken TV and websites/apps as a primary news source for the first time. Our TV business writer Lucas Manfredi wrote that a new poll from from Reuters and the University of Oxford showed that 54% of respondents surveyed reported accessing news via social media and video networks in the U.S. in the previous week, compared to 50% who accessed TV news and 48% who accessed websites/apps in the same period.
Executives in incumbent media knew they were being chased by the new platforms and that consumers were shifting preferences, especially younger ones. Seeing the actual numbers (below), however, was a stark reminder of a future that will be a fight for survival.
3. AI's Fund Raising Bonanza: What struck us about this chart from the Visual Capitalist and ACT / The App Association was not only the breadth of startups raising funds, but what's going on in the creative sector.
As you can see in orange in the lower right, firms like Eleven Labs, Photoroom and Pika are noted, but also Midjourney, the recent target of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal. Midjourney has received quite a bit of press in the tech world for not having raised any funds from the outside, all self-funded. They may need to do a round now to pay for those legal fees.
Executive Spotlight: Jared Bush, Chief Creative Officer, Disney Animation Studios
Jared Bush is an interesting case study for Hollywood — or he will be. Less than a year into the gigantic executive role as chief creative officer at Disney Animation Studios, Bush is a creative at heart, elevated to the C-Suite. In a profile we posted Friday, Bush described that transition to our film reporter Drew Taylor as "tricky."
“I love writing and directing. For me, thinking about, OK, that creative outlet is so important to me. Would I feel the same way in that new role?” Bush told Taylor after showing off footage from Zootopia 2 at the Annecy Animation Festival in France. “And to be honest, I don’t know yet.”
OK. That's candor nobody was expecting.
But something else he shared makes us think he may do just fine as a suit — he's a fastidious planner and he loves data. But more importantly, he understands his team, bottom to top. “They want it to matter. And at the end of the day, more than anything else, they just want to go to the movie with their family and say, ‘This is what I did,’ and for that to mean something.”
Our Favorites From Elsewhere
Too Much TV: Here's How Comcast Spent $40 Billion Over The Past Five Years, Rick Ellis on Substack
The global stakes of the U.S.-China AI rivalry Rest of the World
The Creative Technologist comeback, Howard Gray, Groove Theory newsletter