If you were already concerned with what direction David Ellison’s new Paramount would go once Skydance Media purchased it, well, new reports of influence should raise your hackles. The first clear snapshot of this regime is not a bold new filmmaker or a risky original movie; it’s the president leaning on the Ellison family to revive “Rush Hour 4” from the grave so disgraced Brett Ratner can have a studio-sanctioned comeback. That’s not just lazy IP strip-mining. It reads like a proof of concept for how political wishes will be implemented within this company.
According to Puck’s Matt Belloni, Semafor, and several other outlets, Donald Trump has “personally pressed” Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison to revive the “Rush Hour” series, lobbying his longtime donor and ally to ensure another sequel is made. The Associated Press and others now report that the result of that pressure campaign is precisely what you’d expect: Paramount is finalizing a deal to distribute “Rush Hour 4,” with Ratner back in the director’s chair, after years in which studios like Warner Bros. wanted nothing to do with him.
And here’s where it stops looking like a random coincidence and starts feeling like a dubiously transactional loop. Ratner’s first major project since his 2017 exile is Melania, a lavish Amazon MGM documentary about Melania Trump that Amazon reportedly paid around $40 million to license, covering the 20 days leading up to the 2025 inauguration and credited to Melania as a producer. It’s scheduled to hit theaters in late January 2026 before landing on Prime Video. Multiple outlets underline the same point: this Melania film is effectively Ratner’s big, glossy re-entry into filmmaking after years in the wilderness.
That documentary didn’t just give Ratner a paycheck; it plugged him directly back into the Trump inner circle in the most flattering possible way: a glowingly packaged, access-heavy portrait of the First Lady that Amazon and Trump both clearly see as strategically valuable. And now, right on the heels of that $40 million Valentine, Trump is reportedly burning political capital with the Ellisons to get Ratner a shiny mainstream “comeback” job on “Rush Hour 4” — a project other studios had either passed on or allowed to be shopped around precisely because they didn’t want to be in the Brett Ratner business anymore.
You don’t need a whiteboard to see why this reeks of quid pro quo: you help rehabilitate the Trump brand, Trump leans on his favorite mogul to rehabilitate you.
Ratner’s exile was not ambiguous. A 2017 Los Angeles Times investigation detailed allegations from multiple women accusing him of sexual misconduct and harassment; he denied the accusations, but Warner Bros. tore up a lucrative overall deal and effectively walked him to the door. Since then, his name has become shorthand for the kind of pre-#MeToo power that Hollywood swore, loudly, it would no longer reward. The fact that his route back to studio filmmaking runs through a personally requested sequel from a sitting president — after delivering a glossy propaganda-adjacent doc about the First Lady — is the kind of cozy circularity that should make anyone who cares about culture or accountability furious.
Paramount’s line is that this is “only” a distribution deal — they’re not putting up the money, just providing the pipeline. AP and others dutifully repeat the distinction like it’s supposed to be reassuring. But anyone who understands how this business works knows that distribution is the real power. Without a major studio to market the movie, book the screens, and spend on advertising, there is no franchise revival; there’s just a pitch deck floating in development hell. Ellison’s company is choosing to turn a project most of Hollywood considered toxic into an official product of the new Paramount, then hiding behind semantics as if they’ve been dragged into this against their will. It’s a fig leaf over what looks, smells, and feels like political favoritism — one greased by a very expensive documentary and a mighty friend.
And none of this is happening in a vacuum. The $8.4 billion merger that fused Paramount Global and Skydance — and vaulted Ellison into the CEO chair — only exists because federal regulators under Trump blessed it after months of pressure and backroom horse-trading. The Guardian notes that the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, blasted the deal as a “capitulation” to Trump’s demands. At the same time, the approval arrived just after Paramount paid $16 million to settle what legal experts called a frivolous Trump lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview. Trump himself bragged that the settlement also included millions more in “advertising” and “public service announcements” from the new owners — effectively boasting that the merger came tied to a programming payoff.
So the picture is: the administration leans on the regulators, Paramount forks over millions to make an annoying lawsuit go away, the merger gets waved through over press-freedom objections, and then the newly empowered mogul turns around and services Trump’s nostalgia-drunk sequel wish list with a director the rest of Hollywood left behind. That’s not synergy. That’s what soft corruption looks like in 2025.
Meanwhile, Ellison is not remotely content with one legacy studio. He is actively trying to swallow Warner Bros. Discovery, bolting Warner Bros., HBO and CNN onto his freshly consolidated Paramount–Skydance empire. The trade and business press report that WBD has invited improved bids from several suitors, including Ellison’s company, with at least some proposals aiming to acquire the entire outfit and control a massive share of the theatrical and cable markets in one fell swoop.
To grease those skids, Ellison has hired former Trump DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim as his top legal and strategy architect — a move Belloni describes, bluntly, as the “antitrust playbook” for a Warner bid. The man who previously oversaw antitrust enforcement for Trump is now crafting the argument for why a massive Paramount–Warner merger should be permitted. You could not script a clearer picture of how this process looks when captured.
Then there’s the money question. Variety and others have reported that Ellison’s camp has at least explored teaming up with sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi to mount a supercharged bid for Warner Bros. Discovery — numbers in the $70 billion range have been floated — even as Paramount publicly slaps down specific dollar amounts as “categorically inaccurate.” Other reporting describes quiet outreach to the Saudi Public Investment Fund and other Gulf investors about backing some version of a Warner deal, with “new Middle Eastern partners” openly discussed as a pillar of Ellison’s expansion plans.
So, you have a Trump-aligned media owner, already super-sized by one controversial merger, now trying to rope in foreign petrodollars and a former Trump antitrust chief to buy yet another studio, potentially consolidating something like a third of the theatrical market, plus a sprawling cable-and-streaming footprint, under one politically entangled roof. For anyone concerned about media monopolies or foreign influence over American news and entertainment, this is no hypothetical nightmare. It’s a term sheet being iterated in real time.
And Ellison isn’t just stockpiling movie libraries; he’s rearranging the information ecosystem. Paramount Skydance has already acquired The Free Press, the digital outlet founded by Bari Weiss, and in the same breath installed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, reporting directly to Ellison instead of through the usual network hierarchy. That’s not some plucky independent outlet “earning” a bigger megaphone on the strength of its reporting. It’s a billionaire buying an explicitly pro-Israel, anti- “woke” opinion brand and bolting its worldview onto a legacy broadcast newsroom.
Weiss is not a newsroom veteran promoted from within; she built her profile as a culture-war columnist whose coverage of Israel, Gaza, and campus politics reliably hugs one side of the argument. Ellison, by all accounts, wanted exactly that posture. Reporting around the deal makes it pretty clear that he wasn’t just impressed by The Free Press as a media business — he was attracted to its politics and wanted that sensibility piped straight into CBS. In other words, Ellison decided he wanted a sharper, ideologically aligned voice shaping his news operation, bought the outlet that already embodied that stance, and then handed its founder the keys to CBS so she could amplify his line from inside the building. Her arrival at CBS has coincided with mass layoffs across the network and Paramount, a purge of key standards and race-and-culture desks, and an aggressive push to bring in more conservative voices. Poynter and TheWrap describe staffers stunned by the scale of the cuts and confused memos about editorial direction, while Puck sums it up mordantly as “Bari’s CBS now.”
Veterans are ringing the alarm In recent comments, Katie Couric warned that this structure — with Weiss reporting directly to Ellison after he folds The Free Press into his empire — is “compromising independent journalism,” shredding what’s left of the firewall between business and editorial in favor of one billionaire’s worldview At the same time, Weiss is out on the conference circuit musing about how CBS needs “charismatic” figures like Alan Dershowitz, a former Jeffrey Epstein ally and lawyer and staunchely pro-Israel advocate, on air, a suggestion that landed with a thud even among some of her supposed allies.
Stack that next to Trump’s “Rush Hour 4” gambit and the Warner land-grab. It stops feeling like a string of isolated deals and starts looking like a system In one corner, you have the president reportedly nudging a studio to resurrect a franchise and a director that the rest of Hollywood left behind — a favor that happens to follow a $40 million documentary polishing his wife’s image In another, the same studio is exploring a mega-merger that could bring together CBS, HBO, and CNN, potentially with help from Gulf sovereign wealth funds, while an ex-Trump antitrust chief promises regulators that everything will be fine In the center, you have an opinion-driven media brand being bought outright and plugged directly into CBS News, with its founder elevated to de facto czar of the newsroom and answering only to Ellison.
Is any of this “illegal” in a narrow, technical sense? Maybe not. But this is what corruption looks like in the real world now: not envelopes of cash under a table, but a closed loop where political power, corporate consolidation, foreign money and culture-war media all reinforce one another. Trump wants a Ratner sequel; Ellison obliges. Ellison wants Warner; a former Trump regulator helps him craft the argument, while Middle Eastern capital hovers in the background. The result isn’t a scrappy outlet finally earning a bigger platform; it’s a billionaire with clear political preferences buying the worldview he wants and hard-wiring it into CBS. The audience doesn’t get a freer press out of that arrangement — it receives a narrower one, dressed up as independence.
That’s why “Rush Hour 4” is not just another dumb legacy sequel. It’s the garish, goofy tip of an iceberg that runs straight down into how news gets framed, which auteurs get rehabilitated, what mergers get waved through, and whose politics are quietly baked into the culture. Ellison’s Paramount is still in its opening act, but the pattern is already clear and deeply disconcerting: if you’re helpful in the project — a disgraced director, a friendly president, a like-minded media entrepreneur — the gates swing open. Ellison’s Paramount already looks less like a reborn Hollywood giant and more like a captured influence operation with a studio logo slapped on top — a compliant media machine where the movies are camouflage for the whims of its owner and his friends. If that’s not troubling to you, I’m not sure what else will convince you.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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