Soon-to-be mega movie mogul David Ellison has mostly made really bad films

Soon-to-be Hollywood mega-mogul David Ellison took a view of his new empire yesterday.

If the merger between Warner Bros and Paramount is approved, Ellison will sit atop one of the world’s biggest entertainment studios.

It’s been quite a busy few months for Ellison, who only completed his purchase of Skydance in August, and then armed with daddy’s chequebook, went and bought himself another legacy studio.

Ellison, whose father is Larry Ellison, the founder of software giant Oracle and one of the world’s richest people, turned 43 years old two months ago, and has no experience running an operation this size.

But he has been working in movies since his early 20s, initially with ambitions to become an actor. His dad had funded the movie that gave Ellison his first feature film role, Flyboys, a 2006 war movie starring James Franco which bombed.

When he bought Paramount, it was to bring together the larger entity with Skydance, the production company he founded in 2006, also with his father’s money.

Because of a deal, Skydance had worked closely with Paramount on a number of projects which included Skydance’s biggest successes to date, Top Gun: Maverick and the fourth Mission: Impossible onwards.

The combining of Paramount with Skydance wasn’t a huge surprise, they had synergies and a cosy existing relationship. But Warner Bros will be the more difficult challenge – it makes more films and TV shows, and it makes a variety of works that are not aligned to Ellison’s pop culture inclinations.

Given that he’s a newbie working on this kind of scale, with ownership over an enormous slate of films and TV shows, there’s something instructive about Ellison’s two decades in Hollywood.

To put it bluntly, if you look over Skydance’s output, it reveals someone with pedestrian tastes. Elllison leans towards blockbusters with protagonists that embody traditional masculine ideals.

There have been exceptions, including the Coen brothers’ True Grit and Alex Garland’s Annihilation, but for the most part, the Skydance movies are incredibly, well, bro-ey.

Many of them were straight-to-streaming releases which followed the formula of movie star plus action minus quality.

Among this slate of nonsense movies were Gemini Man, a Will Smith vehicle in which he is targeted by a younger clone of himself, The Tomorrow War, a Chris Pratt project in which he plays a soldier sent to the future to stop an alien attack, and Heart of Stone, a Gal Gadot movie in which she is a spy trying to protect an AI system.

Another time-travelling abomination was The Adam Project, but with Ryan Reynolds racing back to stop the assassination of his wife.

They are even worse than they sound.

There was also Geostorm, which stars Gerard Butler, enough said, the Baywatch movie, Michael Bay’s 6 Underground with Reynolds leading a team of operatives who faked their deaths so they can take down a dictator in a coup, and Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins.

Or how about Transformers: Rise of the Beasts? And The Family Plan, a Mark Walhberg movie where he plays in a suburban dad forced on the run when his secret past as a government assassin is found out.

And who could forget The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Zac Efron delivering beer during the Vietnam War) and The Fountain of Youth (Natalie Portman and John Krasinski as a family of treasure hunters)? Everyone, everyone could forget.

As one former Skydance employee described Ellison to Vulture, “His favourite movie of 2018 was Green Book. He’s got normie taste”.

In the 2010s, it was another Ellison child that was making waves and attracting Hollywood talent. His sister Megan, again, with Larry’s money, had established Annapurna Pictures, and funded the likes of Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, Her, American Hustle, 20th Century Women and If Beale Street Could Talk.

She was working with auteurs such as Barry Jenkins, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Miranda July and Kathryn Bigelow.

But mismanagement and huge losses took Megan and Annapurna largely off the map, although it continues to still produce movies, albeit to a much lesser degree.

Now it’s David with his hands on the chequebook, and you have to wonder if what he greenlights will be more of what’s already making, or if he will keep on the Warner Bros film bosses, Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca, who have had cracking year with films including Oscar frontrunners Sinners and One Battle After Another.

If the 30 movies cinema movies a year he’s promised he’ll make across Paramount and Warner Bros will just be another extension of his personal tastes, then god help us all.