Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Cameron has expressed support for the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger as thousands of industry elites have rallied in opposition to it.
The Titanic director expressed his thoughts about the issue in an interview with the Associated Press.
“I’m a supporter of it. I know it’s controversial,” he said before hailing Paramount CEO David Ellison as being “the right man for the job to run a major studio.”
“I know David quite well. And I know that he really cares about movies,” Cameron said. “And he’s a natural born storyteller and thinks like almost an old school entrepreneurial producer that was a storyteller that loves storytelling and loved putting on spectacular shows.
“He’s the right man for the job to run a major studio, and now it looks like he’s going to have two of them, you know, swept under his leadership, which doesn’t bother me at all,” he added.
Cameron worked with Ellison on Terminator: Dark Fate and previously voiced his opposition to Netflix purchasing Warner Bros. before the streaming giant dropped out.
“I believe strongly that the proposed sale of Warner Brothers Discovery to Netflix will be disastrous for the theatrical motion picture business that I have dedicated my life’s work to,” Cameron wrote in a letter. “Of course, my films all play in the downstream video markets as well, but my first love is the cinema.”
“Theaters will close. Fewer films will be made. The job losses will spiral,” he continued. “The business model of Netflix is directly at odds with the theatrical film production and exhibition business, which employs hundreds of thousands of Americans. It is therefore directly at odds with the business model of the Warner Brothers movie division, one of the few remaining major movie studios.”
Over 2,000 Hollywood insiders, from writers to actors to directors, have signed an open letter opposing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
The letter, reportedly spearheaded by Marvel actor Mark Ruffalo and signed by talents like Bryan Cranston, Joaquin Phoenix, Tiffany Haddish, and Denis Villeneuve, cautioned that a potential acquisition of Warner Bros. from a major studio would lead to “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”
“We have witnessed a steep decline in the number of films produced and released, alongside a narrowing of the kinds of stories that are financed and distributed,” said the letter. “Increasingly, a small number of powerful entities determine what gets made — and on what terms — leaving creators and independent businesses with fewer viable paths to sustain their work.”
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