Thirty years after getting squeezed out in an epic battle for control of Paramount Pictures, Barry Diller appears to be trying again.
The 82-year-old media titan is among the suitors who have expressed interest in buying the Redstone family’s Massachusetts-based holding firm, National Amusements Inc., which controls the voting shares of media company Paramount Global, according to two knowledgeable people who were not authorized to comment publicly.
Paramount Global includes the historic Hollywood studio, broadcast network CBS and a collection of cable TV channels such as MTV and Nickelodeon.
Back in 1994, media mogul Sumner Redstone famously triumphed over Diller in a hard-fought bidding war for control of the Melrose Avenue film studio. Redstone ultimately paid $10 billion for the asset, which many in the industry (including some of Redstone’s own executives) believed was way too steep.
Redstone’s media company, then known as Viacom, then bought Blockbuster video chain for its cash flow that the company needed to service the debt on the Paramount purchase.
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Diller, who had run Paramount in the 1970s — overseeing a period of growth and acclaimed movies — withdrew from the bidding with a characteristic shrug. The mogul went on to run Universal, before making a fortune by building a formidable digital media businesses, IAC.
The New York Times first reported Diller’s interest in National Amusements.
Other potential buyers have also surfaced in recent months, making overtures to mogul Shari Redstone who oversees the family’s empire since her father began dealing with health issues eight years ago. Sumner Redstone died in 2020.
The list of potential suitors includes former top Seagram and Warner Music executive Edgar Bronfman Jr., as well as Hollywood producer Steven Paul (“Ghost in the Shell,” “Baby Geniuses”). Any deal is contingent on due diligence and coming up with enough cash to entice the Redstone family to leave a business where they’ve been major players for decades.
Media mogul Barry Diller, pictured here in 2023, has expressed some interest in the Redstone family holding company National Amusements Inc.
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(Charles Sykes / Invision / AP)
Bronfman, the former entertainment executive and liquor scion, pushed his family to acquire Universal Studios Inc. before selling it to France’s Vivendi more than two decades ago. He is backed by Bain Capital and has suggested paying more than $2 billion for the Redstone firm.
It’s unclear whether Diller will submit an offer to NAI, one of the knowledgeable people said.
“IAC does not comment on rumors or speculation,” a company spokesperson said late Monday.
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NAI is struggling under a mound of debt. For months, Shari Redstone worked behind the scenes to sell NAI to tech scion David Ellison in a two-phase, nearly $8-billion deal that would have seen him eventually merge his production company Skydance Media with Paramount.
But in June, after months of high drama and boardroom tension, Redstone reversed course and Paramount Global’s proposed sale to Ellison’s Skydance Media collapsed.
The Ellison deal would have provided about $2.2 billion for NAI, or about $1.7 billion for the Redstone heirs once NAI’s debts had been paid.
National Amusements said it supports Paramount’s recently installed triumvirate of executives serving in an “office of the CEO”: division heads George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins. It also backed their business plan, which includes $500 million in cost-cutting, and the board’s efforts “to explore opportunities to drive value creation for all Paramount shareholders.”
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
