Ben Affleck Praises Skydance Deal for Paramount: David Ellison Is an Owner, Not “Management Class”

Ben Affleck has never been one to shy away from speaking his mind, and while on a panel at CNBC's Delivering Alpha Summit Wednesday, he weighed in on a number of topics being closely watched by Hollywood, including the looming deal for Skydance to buy Paramount and the growing use of generative artificial intelligence by the industry.

Affleck, of course, is the co-founder and CEO of Artists Equity , the production venture he created with Matt Damon and RedBird's Gerry Cardinale. Cardinale, who sat next to Affleck on the CNBC panel, is also backing David Ellison's bid for Paramount.

Cardinale revealed finances for Artists Equity for the first time, telling David Faber that "we've pre-sold north of $700 million in revenues in seven projects. We're meaningfully cash flow positive. We have built a company in two years."

But Affleck lamented that the job of a creative has gotten more challenging, given the enormous competition for consumer time.

"It's a little harder to do this job now. You actually have to complete a little bit more, the consumer has more options. They don't just have three networks, they don't just have a few studios," he said. "YouTube is kicking people's ass. You can watch a lot of things. It's very diffuse, so you have to work harder and you have to be better. You have to have better managers, you have to be better executers, you have to work with the best talent and you have to have the most rigor."

"The labor is feeling the rollback. Talent, if you look at news, revenue for actors, writers, directors, is feeling the rollback," Affleck adds. "Typically the last group to feel that is the executive class. But that has to come too, it just does, if you want fairness."

But he added that he is hopeful that a rejuvenated Paramount, under the leadership of Ellison, will change things.

"Before Gulf and Western bought Paramount, the original studios had Harry and Jack Warner. These people, they were owners, operators, founders," Affleck said. "They cared about stories, and that's what they built, and then they sold them to other companies and sold them to other companies, and there became a greater distance between the people at the heart of it, sort of caring about telling the stories and the people who viewed them as valuable businesses in which to invest. What that means now is particularly in the case of public companies, you have a different kind of management than you do with owner-managers. There is a management class. They come in and they have a more short-term agenda. There are different incentives at play."

Ellison and Cardinale, by contrast, are "not management class."

"They're going to look at it in a very different way as somebody who's invested as an owner," he added. "How many public companies are there run by the owners? And Hollywood needs more robust entities like Paramount. It's bad for the business when competition goes away, when it turns into oligopolies. It doesn't function as well. And there's a hell of a lot of money to be made in the linear studio space. I'd love to be Gerry and David Ellison. I'd love to go into that ecosystem and say, yeah, there's going to be some difficulty, there's going to be some hard choices, but there's tremendous opportunity and a lot of money to be made."

And the pair addressed the use of generative AI, with Cardinale calling it "a tool in the tool box that will rejuvenate intellectual property."

"You will make more intellectual property, more original content for half the cost," he said. "Now, there'll be dislocations along the way, but that is a positive."

Affleck was both bullish on the potential of the tech and somewhat dismissive of its impact on the film business, though he acknowledged that some parts of the business will be hit hard.

"Movies will be one of the last things, if everything gets replaced, to be replaced by AI. AI can write you excellent imitative verse, that sounds Elizabethan. It cannot write you Shakespeare," Affleck said. "The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct that is something that currently entirely eludes AI's capability and I think will for a meaningful period of time."

"What AI is going to do is going to disintermediate the more laborious, less creative and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people who want to make Good Will Huntings to go out and make it," he adds. "Look, AI is a craftsman, at best. Craftsmen can learn to make Stickley Furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That's how large video models and large language models basically work. Library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret it in context, right? But they're just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created."

"Craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop," Affleck continued. "I think knowing when to stop is going to be a very difficult thing for AI to learn because it's taste. And also lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality. AI, for this world of generative video, is going to do key things more — I wouldn't like to be in the visual effects business. They are in trouble. Because what costs a lot of money is now going to cost a lot less, and it's going to hammer that space, and it already is. And maybe it shouldn't take a thousand people to render something. But it's not going to replace human beings making films."

In fact, Affleck likened AI to the DVD business, a potential revenue generator down the line.

"Eventually AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession, where you can say, I'll pay $30, and can you make me a 45-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy? And it will do it. It will be a little janky and a little bit weird, but it will know those actors and it will remix it in effect. It will do that," Affleck said. "That's the value, in my view, long term of AI for consumers, which is eventually my hope for AI is that it's an additional revenue stream that can replace DVD, which took 15-20 percent out of the economy of filmmaking."