A plane towing a banner reading “Ellison is Trump’s B!tch” was seen flying over the Paramount lot Thursday in protest of the Warner Bros. acquisition.
While it’s not clear who orchestrated the stunt, the plane reportedly “made passes over the Paramount lot as a group calling itself Neighbors for Strong Communities was planning to hold a press conference outside the Paramount gates to raise alarms about what would happen if the studio leaves California,” per Variety.
In April, David Ellison hosted a dinner for the president along with several White House correspondents from CBS News. The dinner came as Ellison’s Paramount sought regulatory approval for its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. During the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in July, the president also joked that David Ellison told him he would renamed the WHCA dinner “the Trump White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”
“He told me that, and I like that very much. We’re going to change the name of it, okay?” Trump said.
Despite the current California lawsuit from AG Rob Bonta in opposition to the merger along with other industry groups, especially the WGA, several Hollywood insiders have backed the merger, including James Cameron and Tom Cruise.
“I think it’s awesome,” Cruise said this week. “You know, here’s the thing. They’re going to deliver 30 movies. It’s a community to me. It’s not an industry. The people in these studios are not just people in the studios. They’re my family. I know we’re going to get those 30 movies. I want us all to come together as a community to help make those 30 movies. It’s not just going to be, you know, Paramount doing it. Everyone’s going to need all the help of every artist to be able to do it.”
Cruise, who worked with Paramount on the smash hit Top Gun: Maverick, said that the 30 movies released could easily become 40 movies, which would empower artists and directors to make the “films that they want.”