Jane Fonda Explains Why She’s Fighting the Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Despite Loving David Ellison

Jane Fonda has never been shy about turning her celebrity into activism, building a decades-long track record of speaking out on issues she believes threaten workers, consumers, and the entertainment industry she’s called home for most of her life. At 88, she shows no signs of softening that approach, using a recent appearance at the Venice Film Festival to once again wade directly into one of Hollywood’s biggest ongoing business battles.

Fonda was in Venice being honored at the DVF Awards, a charity gala hosted by designer Diane von Furstenberg celebrating extraordinary women, alongside honorees including Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley and French feminist icon Gisèle Pelicot. Before the ceremony, she sat down with a small group of journalists and didn’t hold back when the conversation turned to business.

Asked about her opposition to the ongoing Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Fonda laid out a detailed case against the deal, framing it as damaging for consumers, workers, and creatives alike. “I am hopeful that we can stop it,” she said, before walking through her concerns point by point.

“They’re carrying so much debt. The Ellisons are carrying so much debt, and you know it’s being postponed now, so that they have to pay these huge sums,” Fonda told Variety. “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. We lose bargaining power. Unions lose their power.”

What makes Fonda’s opposition notable is that it comes despite a genuine personal fondness for Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, whose company financed her Netflix series ‘Grace and Frankie’ across its seven-year run. She was careful to separate her feelings about him from her stance on the deal itself.

“It’s sad for me because I like David Ellison very much,” Fonda explained. “David’s Skydance financed ‘Grace and Frankie,’ my seven-year-long run for Netflix, and I got to know him, and I like him. But that doesn’t change things. This is not a personal thing. This is what it will do to the entertainment industry, which is already suffering terribly.”

Fonda also weighed in on how her late ex-husband, CNN founder Ted Turner, might have felt watching Paramount potentially absorb the network he built. She argued Turner would be “terribly upset” by the prospect, drawing a parallel to his own reluctance decades ago when he ultimately sold his media holdings despite initial resistance.

The conversation also touched on actor Mark Ruffalo, who has faced accusations of antisemitism after speaking out against the merger. Fonda defended him firmly, characterizing the accusation as a deliberate silencing tactic rather than a genuine concern.

She pointed specifically to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, arguing that his objection to Ruffalo’s stance on the merger, rather than any actual antisemitic conduct, was driving the criticism. Fonda framed the broader dynamic as part of a troubling pattern in Hollywood, one she believes requires collective pushback rather than isolated resistance.

Beyond the merger talk, Fonda gave an update on her acting career, revealing that Lionsgate’s ‘The Correspondent,’ an adaptation of Virginia Evans’ bestselling novel, is now in the final stages of pre-production, with hopes that filming could begin as early as January depending on the director’s schedule. After five years away from acting, she admitted she genuinely misses the process of transforming into another character, even as her activism continues to dominate her public presence.

With the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal still working its way through what Fonda describes as a growing resistance movement, her comments add another high-profile voice to an already contentious fight over the future of the industry.

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