One weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie, Flyboys, had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars had abruptly checked into the hospital. On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. “I was terrified when the phone rang and it was Larry Ellison,” Devlin said.
Devlin had made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s — Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla — but he’d struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men, had a college-age son named David who was not only trying to break into Hollywood but was also an amateur pilot. David even had a nascent film-production company with an aerial name: Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost $60 million, and Skydance was listed as a producer. David, meanwhile, got a plum role, alongside James Franco, as a pilot named Eddie who can’t shoot straight. “Come on, Eddie,” David says to himself in the climactic fight scene. “Do something right.”
Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office, and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn’t all that stressed about the money; he had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race. He was, however, concerned about his son — the actor in the hospital. The reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation; doctors had to shock his heart back into rhythm. “He was thinking that whole weekend, I just lost my dad a bunch of money,” Devlin said. “He was upset about letting his father down.” Larry told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of him.
Flyboys was the humble beginning of the Ellison family’s adventures in Hollywood. After giving up on acting, David spent more than a decade building Skydance into a player in the blockbuster business, financing such hits as Top Gun: Maverick and the Mission: Impossible series along with a number of largely forgettable movies. He was, in other words, a producer much like many others in town. Then, last year, David’s father put up billions to help him buy Paramount, one of Hollywood’s legendary movie studios and a company more than ten times the size of Skydance. This past fall, the Ellisons set their sights on an even bigger prize: Warner Bros. Discovery.
