How close was Barry Diller to securing control of Paramount Global? Closer than some reports may have made it seem, if Diller’s recollection of his pursuit is accurate.
Speaking at a Financial Times summit Friday, Diller said that he was genuinely, seriously interested in acquiring the studio, “more for symmetry of my life” than any other reason.
“At age 52 I went into a bidding contest against the Redstones [for Paramount] and decided not to, in the end, bid the final bid and take it,” he continued. “And so then another 30 years passed, and here it comes up again. I thought of it as a duty rather than a desire. I thought I knew what to do with it. And I think that when you have a company that has been mismanaged for more than 15 years … and if you get that asset and it still is running on even fumes, having it been mismanaged that long, is a great opportunity, and we thought very seriously about it.”
Diller believes that his pursuit ultimately sped up Skydance’s successful bid for the company (Redstone “ought to send a nice pot of flowers or chicken soup,” Diller quipped), and once they inked a deal, he decided to back away.
“Once Skydance closed its deal, it became a formal process where you could bid higher than they bid, and you either get it or not. And I decided not to participate in an auction,” Diller said. “And I also decided that I didn’t really desire it.”
The media mogul, of course, also shared his thoughts on the state of Hollywood, where he once again stated that he believes legacy studios will fight an uphill battle against tech giants.
“The landscape is no longer fertile terrain,” Diller said. “It simply is now challenged in ways it had never been challenged before. I don’t mean that the legacy companies are going to go out of business. I don’t really think they will, but I don’t think they have hegemony over the world.”
“Hollywood no longer has that hegemony,” he continued. “What is the definition of the leadership of Hollywood? The definition is that it has moved to technology companies, Netflix, Amazon and Apple are really the controllers of what I think anybody would call the worldwide film and television business. That’s a country — to say the least — mile from what our imagery of quote Hollywood was.”
And he argued that the desire from some companies like Warner bros. Discovery to pursue consolidation is quixotic, at best.
“I’m not a big fan of consolidation. I think that’s all a canard of people who just have large egos and want to score about how scale is so important,” Diller said. “If you have route to distribution, meaning you can get your product out — and today, there are so many different ways to get your product to an audience. I mean, essentially, it’s pushing a key on a computer and publishing to the world — so scale has nothing to do with it. What has to do with it is, are you making programs, movies and television, products that people want to see. If you’re better than your competitor in doing that, you’ll do okay. What you will never do is change the actual lay of the land, because the tech companies have so much capital.”
And he weighed in on artificial intelligence, telling the conference that he has seen some of the advanced models in development, and that “I think we’re within months, maybe a year, of true artificial general intelligence. It’s so mind boggling, it’s almost even impossible to grasp.”
As for what that means for Hollywood: “If you’re in the animation business, that was huge employment — CGI work alone, incredibly costly — hundreds, thousands of people on staff to make animated movies,” Diller said. “I don’t think you’re going to need anyone.”