David Ellison outlined a central role for artificial intelligence in his combined Paramount and Warner Bros. business during his first earnings call leading both companies. He told analysts that the technology could accelerate production and reduce costs while arguing that carefully crafted storytelling would retain its value amid a growing supply of AI-generated content.
Ellison compared AI’s creative possibilities with the arrival of mainstream computer-generated imagery and digital compositing in the early 1990s. He cited Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 as examples of stories enabled by those advances and said he believes AI could have an even greater impact. At the same time, he distinguished that potential from what he called “AI slop,” saying audiences would continue to place a premium on work shaped by human craftsmanship.
The strategy accompanies plans for Skydance to spend $30 billion a year across its content portfolio. That spending encompasses HBO television projects, CBS procedurals, MTV reality programming, NFL rights and films from Warner Bros. and Paramount. Ellison also presented established intellectual property as protection against competition from AI content, describing the company as holding 40 franchises worth $1 billion each. He linked those properties to premium experiences for more than 203 million subscribers across Paramount+ and HBO Max, which are set to combine.
To explain how lower production costs might encourage creative risk, Ellison turned to The Terminator, a franchise Skydance has rebooted multiple times. He said James Cameron made the original film for $4 million in 1983 and estimated that recreating it shot for shot now would cost $60 million to $70 million. In his view, AI tools could make budgets more manageable and allow studios to back more original stories that would otherwise be difficult to finance.
Cameron, who directed the original Arnold Schwarzenegger film and its sequel, has been a prominent Ellison supporter, including during Skydance’s contest with Netflix for Warner Bros. The director has also pursued the technology through his own business. His Lightstorm company purchased an AI-driven 3D post-production firm in September.
The emphasis on technology also reflects Ellison’s connection to his father Larry Ellison’s Oracle fortune. During the call, Oracle Fusion enterprise cloud applications were mentioned in discussions about combining back office operations, another element of the effort to reshape the legacy studios around technology.
AI is also part of Skydance’s pursuit of roughly $6 billion in savings from the merger. Alongside reducing overlapping corporate overhead, property and facilities costs, the company plans to expand AI workflows throughout the combined business. Ellison said the goal of bringing Paramount+ and HBO Max together within a year was ambitious, but achievable with the latest artificial intelligence tools.
