An internal memo leak going around a legacy studio like Paramount, the people take notice. But that memo, however is quite specific about how CEO David Ellison’s privately framing his firm’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, it is something much larger — a window into the way one of Hollywood’s youngest power players is attempting to remake an entire entertainment empire.
The memo wasn’t intended for investors, regulators or the press. It was for staff — the people who work at a company that has spent years battling shrinking cable revenues, large streaming losses, nonstop takeover rumors and a market that is increasingly impatient with old-school media. And that’s why Ellison’s tone is so striking. It wasn’t defensive. It wasn’t cautious. It was brash in a way Paramount hasn’t sounded for years, as though he were trying to rally an anxious workforce that somewhere along the line the company had finally found the fight it wanted to pick.
Ellison made the memo largely in response to Warner Bros. Discovery bid as a once-in-a-generation opportunity — to break free from survival mode and swing for dominance. He told staff members that Hollywood was consolidating “whether we like it or not” and companies that stopped would get swallowed. The message was clear: Paramount had to make a move, even if the bid seemed aggressive on its face.
He was said to have spent a lot of it leaning into the term “future-proofing,” those words that tech CEOs can’t get enough of but which workers in studios don’t often hear from their execs. Ellison framed Warner Bros. Discovery not as a rescue target, but instead a strategic fit — one that can combine to make the sort of scale required to vie with Disney, Netflix, Amazon and Apple. In his mind, the business has reached a point where midsize studios cannot thrive going it alone. And he wasn’t offering the delusion that such a campaign would be easy. He said it was hard and risky, complicated — but necessary.
What leapt off the memo wasn’t the corporate speak. It was the urgency. Ellison didn’t use the word “synergies” or “portfolio alignment.” Instead, he spoke in terms of momentum, vision and the importance of putting back together pieces of a legacy brand that has been losing control of its narrative over the last few years. He informed employees that such signals sent the message that Paramount could not afford to remain passive while the rest of the industry reconfigured around them. It was a tacit acknowledgment of what employees had already sensed: the company had been adrift.
The leaked memo also disclosed something unspoken, but equally crucial — Ellison’s bid to calm the jitters of those who believe they’ll be among the first refugees in a Dell merger. He said that creatives, engineers, production crews and the teams behind Paramount’s biggest brand would be at the center of whatever came next. He stressed stability even as he readied them for upheaval, a tricky balancing act for a studio that has been through endless numbers of leadership changes and strategic resets.
The memo, insiders say, landed with a sense of both hope and skepticism. Some employees liked the decisiveness. Other expressed concerns about “what ‘necessary’ means in corporate speak. Everyone understood the stakes. Paramount has been under months of pressure — subscriber growth that is slowing down; debt concerns; questions about its streaming strategy, not to mention an investor base used to clarity coming at them faster than the company can give it. A splashy acquisition doesn’t eliminate those problems, but it does give Paramount — the studio with more whims of corporate whim than anyone else these last few years — a story line that isn’t about shrinking. It’s about bulking up.
What Ellison didn’t say may have been more revealing still. He did not minimize the regulatory battle that would accompany the deal. He didn’t pretend Warner Bros. Discovery was in perfect shape. And it was not a clear path forward that he promised. Instead, he cast the bid as a wager on scale, brand muscle and storytelling — the building blocks that he argued still matter in an industry awash with algorithms and content surfeit.
The memo reads like a flare sent up by a CEO who knows the moment he’s in as Hollywood is split apart. Streaming growth has slowed. Studios are hungry to discover the next stage of identity. And each company is in a mad scramble to figure out how to stay large enough to matter without keeling over under its own weight.
Ellison’s message to the troops wasn’t just about a merger. It was waking up and saying Paramount doesn’t want to be that studio waiting for the rescue anymore. It wants to be the one on the advancing side. Whether such confidence in himself will pay off is still a colossal question — but at least for now, the memo proves one point: David Ellison is no longer on the defense.
