Barry Diller said his interest in Paramount Global “unquestionably” pushed Skydance to close its merger with the media company.
Shari Redstone, who controls Paramount via her family holding National Amusements Inc. “ought to send a nice pot of flowers or chicken soup” as a token of appreciation, Diller joked.
The months-long sale process finally wrapped last month. Skydance prevailed with its proposal to invest $8 billion in buying out NAI and then merging with Paramount. The pact is starting regulatory review and is expected to close in the first half of 2025.
Speaking at the FT Business of Entertainment Summit, Diller recounted the “symmetry” of a potential run at Paramount Global, given that he once ran the company’s film and TV studio and took on Sumner Redstone in a bidding war for the studio. The decade he spent at Paramount, from age 32 to 42, comprised “a big 10 years of my life,” Diller said, as he battled Sumner Redstone another decade after that.
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Financial opportunity motivated him more than sentiment, Diller emphasized. “I thought of it as a duty rather than a desire,” he said. “I thought I knew what to do with it. And when you have a company that has been mismanaged for more than 15 years at the very top – the two CEOs of that company … truly mismanaged the asset.” He declined to name names, but presumably was referring to Philippe Dauman and Bob Bakish, who succeeded Dauman as Viacom CEO before then running the combined ViacomCBS, which was renamed Paramount.
“When you get that asset and it’s still running on even fumes, having it mismanaged that long is a great opportunity,” Diller said. “We thought very seriously about it and had many different discussions” with NAI. “We were the ones, clearly, that got Skydance to close the first round of it.” The day after word appeared of Diller’s interest, Diller recalled, Skydance “folded on all of the issues that had been in contention,” making a joint announcement with Paramount. (The merger pact included a 45-day “go-shop” provision, and a group led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. posed one last challenge to Skydance after Diller was out of the mix.)
Looking at the broader media landscape, Diller proclaimed that the “hegemony” that Hollywood has enjoyed for nearly a century is now over. Big Tech (and, in media and entertainment, specifically Netflix, Amazon and Apple) now set the agenda for the industry and popular culture.
Even so, he said legacy companies won’t go out of business anytime soon. Diller dismissed talk of further consolidation and M&A as a “canard of people who have large egos and want to score.”