Welcome to Rendering, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of AI and showbiz. Rendering examines how artificial intelligence is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you inside key battlegrounds and spotlighting change makers wielding the technology for good and ill. Got a story about AI? Rendering wants to hear from you: jkanter@deadline.com.
It’s been a big week for media M&A fans. Connoisseurs of consolidation have been feasting on the news of Paramount’s last-gasp $110B swoop for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and the unexpectedly swift union of Banijay and All3Media.
The two deals are not comparable in size — Paramount will dwarf the newly formed Banijay production studio — but they share much in common, not least an embrace of the idea that bigger means better. The consolidators talked up scale, opined about empowering creatives, and super-serving audiences/clients, but there is another commonality that links their ambition: Artificial intelligence.
Paramount Skydance chief David Ellison was asked about AI on Monday when sketching out the contours of the WBD deal on an investor call. The one-time Flyboys star said the technology would be “transformative,” pointing to comments from February, when he said the “power of IP enabled by AI” would be a “tailwind” for his new jumbo jet of a company.
Ellison was guarded on details, but it’s not hard to imagine how AI models could be trained on Paramount and Warner titles to iterate new studio ideas, refine recommendation tools in streaming, and improve ad tech.
Ellison even tried to emphasize his message by putting a positive spin on Seedance 2.0, the Chinese AI tool that sent Hollywood into a panic. He said it showed how audiences want to play with Paramount characters like SpongeBob and Eric Cartman. Could WarnerMount go the way of Disney and do an AI licensing deal that puts storytelling powers in the hands of viewers, or could Ellison use his Dad’s Oracle tech to achieve the same aim?
Over at Banijay, group CEO François Riahi was a little more specific. He told investors that Banijay is developing an AI model that will allow employees to use simple text prompts to create videos from a 260,000-hour content catalog, once the All3Media deal is closed.
Popping on his chef’s hat, he gave the example of text prompting a “two-minute format with the best recipes of MasterChef globally,” which could then be distributed on YouTube or elsewhere. Riahi added that only 5-10% of Banijay’s library is being exploited at any given moment, meaning that AI would be “really important” in putting the remaining 90% of finished tape to work.
So Paramount and Banijay think that AI will juice their libraries. And that’s before you get into the savings artificial intelligence could create in areas such as business services, product building, and post-production. Could the technology be the difference between these deals flying and flopping, like eye-watering media mergers of the past?
The message from Ellison and Riahi appears to be: Yes. They would say this, of course. And it’s one thing to express an AI vision to analysts on a conference call, quite another to convince companies built on creatives — some of whom face chastening job cuts — that the technology is friend, not foe. There will be opposition, mistakes will likely be made, and it’s why Ellison has repeatedly stated that AI is “never a replacement for filmmakers.”
One thing is certain, Paramount and Banijay will provide interesting test cases in whether AI really is the magic sauce for unlocking value in media mega-mergers.