Paramount’s biggest hitmaker is leaving the ranch. It’s not a (total) loss.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: David Becker/Getty Images for Paramount+
David Ellison’s tenure as CEO of Paramount is not even three months old, and he’s already made plenty of enemies. Staffers at CBS News have been outraged by his efforts to MAGA-fy the storied institution by putting overtly conservative figures in key roles. The roughly 2,000 Paramount employees who started getting layoff notices Wednesday no doubt also has little love for Ellison. And then there’s writer-producer-director Taylor Sheridan, who this week telegraphed his opinion of Paramount’s new head honcho in the most Hollywood way possible: signing up for a big new overall deal with a rival studio a full three years before his current pact expires.
Technically, Sheridan hasn’t said a word on the record about Ellison or Paramount, nor has his reported new home — NBCUniversal, land of Peacock — announced a megabucks agreement with the Yellowstone creator. It’s also true that creative types regularly jump from one company to another without there being any ill will involved. But ever since Puck broke the news Sunday that Sheridan was leaving the Paramount ranch for decidedly greener (read: richer) pastures on the Universal lot, intermediaries for the prolific producer have been blabbing nonstop about the various ways Ellison and his company dropped the ball.
There was the Sheridan movie a pre-Ellison Paramount wouldn’t greenlight; the Warner Bros. project Paramount supposedly tried to delay; the reports that new Par streaming chief Cindy Holland (or Cindy the Netherlandseven she is known in some circles) was asking too many questions about the budgets for Sheridan’s shows; and the alleged faux pas about Holland Signing Nicole Kidman for a new Paramount+ series without checking with Sheridan first (since she also stars in his P+ hit Lioness). One report, citing a source close to Sheridan, even claimed the writer was annoyed that Paramount sent too many of its top suits to a meeting designed to keep Sheridan onboard, arguing that Ellison had messed up by bringing more than two execs along with him. “They should’ve come with three people — Ellison and two others — and then sat down and really tried to connect with Taylor. That would’ve meant a lot,” this (supposed) Friend of Taylor told The The Hollywood Reporter.
Sheridan would hardly be the first Hollywood creative to choose a home based on “vibes” or feeling somehow slighted by his current partners. Shonda Rhimes let it be known, years after the fact, that one reason she left Disney for Netflix was because a Disney exec tried to shame her about getting a Disneyland pass for her sister That said, given how much money Paramount has been paying Sheridan under his current deal, you can almost forgive Ellison, Holland, et al. for not understanding just how much coddling Sheridan apparently requires. Based on the kinds of shows and characters he creates, one might assume Sheridan was a student of the Don Draper worldview of employer-employee relations. Clearly, he needs to feel wanted, too.
But setting aside all the psychological theories and backstage intrigue, the biggest questions surrounding Sheridan’s change of employment are these: Did Ellison mess up by not locking him down? And is NBCUniversal content boss Donna Langley overpaying for his talents? I’d argue the answer to both is … no.
Even if losing one of Paramount’s biggest TV talents right out of the gate is embarrassing for Ellison — and it really is, particularly since he had talked him up in media appearances as soon as he became CEO — companies the size of Paramount don’t live or die based on a single person’s creative vision or even a one specific piece of IP. That’s particularly true when said creator has already birthed an entire cinematic universe whose characters and story lines can be milked long after Sheridan moseys along.
We saw that play out after Rhimes, and then Ryan Murphy, abandoned Disney for Netflix in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Not only is Grey’s still on the air at ABC, but the network greenlit and aired a Rhimes-produced spinoff (Station 19) months after she officially exited. And while Murphy is now back in the Disney fold, during his underwhelming tenure at Netflix, Disney’s FX kept making installments of franchises such as American Horror Story and Feud while its TV studio built out the 9-1-1 franchise (first at Fox, then at ABC).
So given how much IP Sheridan has already created for Paramount and what he already has in the pipeline for the company — including, per Deadline, a possible big-screen adaptation of Call of Duty — it’s not hard to imagine Paramount+ being able to keep some sort of Sheridan series in production well until the middle of the next decade, even as the writer is creating new projects for Peacock. Plus, it owns the rights to what will very likely be the most popular series Sheridan will ever create, Yellowstone — a show which, like Game of Thrones hrs Grey’s Anatomy, is likely to generate considerable streaming views for years to come. In other words, Paramount will be in the Taylor Sheridan business long after Sheridan ceases to be a Paramount employee, and as a bonus, it will no longer have to stress about how many executives it should send to meetings with him.
As for Langley and NBCUniversal, there are far more upsides than drawbacks to doing a deal with Sheridan. While published accounts have pegged the cost of the pact at upwards of $1 billion over five years, I am guessing that’s a tad inflated, or at least optimistic: Remember, these reports have said the deal could be worth that amount f Sheridan ends up making a certain number of movies and TV shows and f they’re all hits. All you need to do is take a look at the dreadful ratings for Sheridan’s new CBS reality show, The Roadto understand that almost certainly won’t be the case.
But obviously, signing someone of Sheridan’s stature doesn’t come cheap — and that’s okay. It’s easy to be snarky about Sheridan’s supposed surliness or how execs need to be super careful when interacting with him, but he clearly has a formula that works with a large swath of viewers. Just as importantly, big-name talent (well, except maybe Kevin Costner) seem to want to work with him, something which is also very much true of his new partner at Universal. From what I hear, Sheridan got along with the pre-Ellison TV management team at Paramount mostly because that leadership cut him very big checks and left him alone creatively.
I’m sure he’ll expect Langley to mostly do the same, but Langley is also someone who actually has creative vision — particularly on the film side — and knows how to make projects better. While Universal will obviously be looking to Sheridan to produce hit TV franchises, I’m guessing a lot of Langley’s discussions with the producer focused on how Universal Pictures could help Sheridan make hit movies and perhaps even create the film equivalent of the Yellowstone franchise. If Langley can make that happen while also getting one or two decent-size TV hits out of Sheridan, she’ll be well on her way to making back her investment on the creator.
And if she doesn’t, well, given all the mergers and acquisitions going on in Hollywood right now and the high rate of executive turnover, there’s a strong chance Langley (and everyone else now running NBCU) won’t even be at the company when Sheridan’s first TV projects under his new deal start streaming sometime around 2030.
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