Media mogul Barry Diller has spoken of his short-lived pursuit of Paramount Global three decades after he first made a run at Paramount, stating: “I thought of it as a duty rather than a desire.”
The chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, who ran Paramount Pictures from 1974-84 and was chairman and CEO of Fox, Inc, explained to the Financial Times Business of Entertainment Summit on Friday his personal history with the storied studio.
“At 52 I went into a bidding contest against the Redstones [Sumner] and in the end decided not to bid the final bid and take it,” Diller said. “Then another 30 years passed and it comes up again. I thought of it as a duty rather than a desire. I thought I knew what to do with it.”
He said despite the fact that Paramount Global had been “mismanaged for more than 15 years” its assets presented a good opportunity and his team considered an acquisition “very seriously”.
In the end David Ellison’s Skydance Media won out in an $8bn deal to acquire National Amusements and merge with Paramount Global, which is expected to close in the first half of 2025 once it clears regulatory hurdles.
Diller also remarked that his pursuit of Paramount Global “unquestioningly” drove Skydance to get the deal over the line.
Surveying the Hollywood landscape more broadly, the mogul noted that the legacy studios no longer control the global film and television business and have ceded the reins to the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
“I don’t mean that the legacy companies will go out of business,” he said. “I don’t think they will, but I don’t think they have hegemony over the world.”
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