How close was Barry Diller to securing control of Paramount Global? Closer than some accounts may have made it seem, if Diller’s recollection of his pursuit is accurate.
Speaking at a Financial Times summit on Friday, Diller said he was sincerely and seriously interested in acquiring the firm, “more for the symmetry of my life” than for any other reason.
“At 52 I took part in a bidding war against the Redstones [for Paramount] and ultimately decided not to make the final offer and take it,” he continued. “And so another 30 years went by, and here it is again. I thought of it as a duty rather than a desire. I thought I knew what to do with it. And I think when you have a company that has been mismanaged for more than 15 years … and if you get that asset and it's still running on waste gas, having mismanaged it for that long is a great opportunity, and we thought about it very seriously.”
Diller believes his research ultimately precipitated Skydance's winning bid for the company (Redstone “should send a nice vase of flowers or chicken soup,” Diller joked), and once the deal was sealed, he decided to back out.
“Once Skydance did the deal, it became a formal process where you could bid higher than they did, and either you got it or you didn't. And I decided not to go to an auction,” Diller said. “And I also decided I didn't really want to.”
The media mogul, of course, also shared his thoughts on the state of Hollywood, where he reiterated his belief that traditional movie studios will have an uphill battle to fight against the tech giants.
“The landscape is no longer fertile ground,” Diller said. “It's just being challenged in ways it's never been challenged before. I don't mean to say legacy companies are going to fail. I don't think they are going to fail, but I don't think they have hegemony over the world.”
“Hollywood doesn't have that hegemony anymore,” he continued. “What's the definition of Hollywood leadership? The definition is that it's shifted to the tech companies, Netflix, Amazon, Apple are really the controllers of what I think anyone would call the global movie and television business. It's a country, to put it mildly, a mile away from what our Hollywood quote-unquote imagery used to be.”
And he argued that the desire of some companies like Warner Bros. Discovery to pursue consolidation is quixotic at best.
“I'm not a big fan of consolidation. I think it's all a hoax by people who just have big egos and want to make points about how important scale is,” Diller said. “If you have a distribution route, meaning you can get your product out there, and there are so many different ways to get your product out to an audience today. I mean, it's basically hitting a button on a computer and putting it out into the world, so scale has nothing to do with it. What it does have to do with is whether you're making shows, movies and TV shows, products that people want to watch. If you're better than your competitor at that, you'll be fine. What you're never going to do is change the actual shape of the land, because tech companies have so much capital.”
And he weighed in on AI, telling the conference that he’s seen some of the advanced models being developed and that “I think we’re a few months, maybe a year away from true AI general intelligence. It’s so mind-boggling, it’s almost impossible to comprehend.”
As for what this means for Hollywood: “If you’re in the animation industry, that was a huge job, just CGI work, incredibly expensive, hundreds, thousands of people on staff to make animated movies,” Diller said. “I don’t think you’re going to need anybody.”