One weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie, Flyboys, had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars had abruptly checked into the hospital. On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. “I was terrified when the phone rang and it was Larry Ellison,” Devlin said.
Devlin had made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s — Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla — but he’d struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men, had a college-age son named David who was not only trying to break into Hollywood but was also an amateur pilot. David even had a nascent film-production company with an aerial name: Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost $60 million, and Skydance was listed as a producer. David, meanwhile, got a plum role, alongside James Franco, as a pilot named Eddie who can’t shoot straight. “Come on, Eddie,” David says to himself in the climactic fight scene. “Do something right.”
Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office, and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn’t all that stressed about the money; he had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race. He was, however, concerned about his son — the actor in the hospital. The reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation; doctors had to shock his heart back into rhythm. “He was thinking that whole weekend, I just lost my dad a bunch of money,” Devlin said. “He was upset about letting his father down.” Larry told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of him.
https://archive.ph/kibmV#selection-1785.0-1821.129
Paramount Skydance
is suing Warner Bros. Discovery
and CEO David Zaslav as its latest step in a hostile pursuit to acquire WBD, CEO David Ellison outlined in a letter to WBD shareholders on Monday.
The lawsuit asks a Delaware court to direct Warner Bros. Discovery to provide information about its sale process and pending deal with Netflix
.
“WBD has failed to include any disclosure about how it valued the Global Networks stub equity, how it valued the overall Netflix transaction, how the purchase price reduction for debt works in the Netflix transaction, or even what the basis is for its ‘risk adjustment’ of our $30 per share all-cash offer,” Ellison said in the letter on Monday.
“We filed suit this morning in Delaware Chancery Court to ask the court to simply direct WBD to provide this information so that WBD shareholders have what they need to be able to make an informed decision as to whether to tender their shares into our offer,” Ellison said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/paramount-skydance-warner-bros-discovery-suit.html