Jane Fonda used her turn on stage at Venice’s DVF Awards this week to renew her opposition to Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, warning the $111 billion deal would raise consumer prices and cost thousands of industry jobs even as she praised the personal character of the man leading it.
“The merger would be terrible for consumers. Prices would go up. Thousands and thousands of people would lose their jobs, and as a creative, the fewer studios there are, the fewer places that we can take our products,” Fonda said Thursday, according to remarks reported by Variety. She argued that further industry consolidation would weaken bargaining power for both creatives and unions, pointing to the debt load carried by the Ellison family as a particular concern. “They’re carrying so much debt, and it’s being postponed now, so that they have to pay these huge sums,” she said.
The 88-year-old actress and longtime activist was careful to separate her business objections from her personal relationship with Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, whose Skydance Television banner financed her seven-season Netflix series “Grace and Frankie.” “It’s sad for me because I like David Ellison very much… but that doesn’t change things. This is not a personal thing,” she said.
Fonda also defended actor Mark Ruffalo, who has faced accusations of antisemitism from Paramount after criticizing the merger and its financial ties to Oracle, the technology company co-founded by David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison. Ruffalo had connected Oracle’s work with the Israeli military to his broader concerns about media consolidation, prompting Paramount to accuse him of invoking antisemitic tropes.
More than 170 Jewish entertainment figures, including Hannah Einbinder and Emma Seligman, later signed a letter calling the accusations against Ruffalo an “outrageous smear campaign.” Fonda sided firmly with Ruffalo at the awards ceremony. “Larry Ellison, because he doesn’t like Mark Ruffalo’s position on the merger, accuses him of antisemitism, when he said nothing that isn’t within his constitutional right to say,” she said. “He should be ashamed of himself.”
The merger, which Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders approved in April, remains held up in federal court amid an antitrust challenge from a coalition of state attorneys general. Fonda was honored Thursday alongside Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, photojournalist Lynsey Addario and other honorees at the 17th annual DVF Awards, founded by designer Diane von Furstenberg.
