SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Powerful parties want the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery merger to succeed. And no, we're not talking about President Trump or the Ellison family. Several Persian Gulf wealth funds have pledged a total of $24 billion for Paramount's attempted takeover, including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. According to the latest cover story in The Hollywood Reporter, this is part of a broader push by the country to curry favor with Trump by influencing Washington and also keep young Saudi eyes and minds on the screens, not on questions of human rights. Scott Roxborough wrote the story and joins us now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
SCOTT ROXBOROUGH: Oh, thanks very much for having me.
DETROW: I want to start with the current moment because typically in investment like this, you can think about it as a form of soft power - right? - a way to burnish a country's global reputation. And that's going on here, though there's also this specific dynamic right now that you report on of - this has a lot to do with Saudi Arabia's relationship with President Trump. So how does this effort tie into that goal?
ROXBOROUGH: Yeah, I think getting close to people like the Ellisons, who are going to be buying Warner Bros - they are very close to Trump and his family - this all helps the Saudis curry favor, helps them be on the right side of Donald Trump, which can only help them further down the line on political matters.
DETROW: You know, I want to talk about the implications of this deal, but I think if you zoom out a little bit, the Saudi Arabian government and this investment fund has been making all sorts of investments in the last few years. And there was a report from the Financial Times recently that it might be actually pulling back from one of them, LIV Golf, which was set up as this potential rival to PGA golf. Now, NPR hasn't independently confirmed that. But if that's the case, what do you think that tells you about the broader goals and strategy of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's efforts here to spend this money in this way?
ROXBOROUGH: I think you can broadly say the goals that Mohammed bin Salman had when he set out his plans, his investment plans, were sort of threefold. One was what we mentioned about this sort of soft power investment, but I think more important ones were to move Saudi Arabia away from its dependence on oil and gas revenues. And the other was to really open up the country inside to sort of liberalize its cultural offerings, if I can put it that way, to make the sort of local audience give them things to do and not get involved in sort of political disruption. And the oil price being what it has been over the last number of years - obviously, it's been going up recently because of the Iran war. But the oil price has been quite low, which has not allowed Saudis to invest as much as they would like to or to get the sort of returns that they would like to. Because of that, it seems that the Saudi government might be curtailing a bit of their ambitions.
DETROW: And then on the geopolitical front, you write, quote, "in Hollywood and in Washington, few believe that $24 billion won't come with strings attached, particularly for a deal that will include CNN, HBO and a film catalog with rights to Batman, Superman and Harry Potter." What do you think those strings could look like?
ROXBOROUGH: Yeah, so it'll be interesting to see - a caveat here is that the investment that the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund has made for the Warner Bros acquisition does not give them a controlling stake of Warner Bros on paper, so they're not going to have seats on the board. They're not going to have any official control over what Warner Bros does or says. However, these type of investments usually do come with some form of subtle coercion.
DETROW: Yeah.
ROXBOROUGH: It's similar to what happened over a decade ago when there was a lot of Chinese investment in Hollywood. We started to see a move away from Hollywood portrayals of the Chinese as being the baddies and a more sort of positive image. And that wasn't directly an influence that the Chinese government or the Chinese investors were having on production companies, but more general feel of, well, if the money's coming from there, we should probably meet them halfway when it comes to how we depict them.
DETROW: I mean, earlier, you laid out all of the different goals of these big investments. And it seems to me that looking at the early returns, all of those goals are being met. I mean, is this being viewed as successful so far?
ROXBOROUGH: I guess it depends on how you measure success. I think if you talk about the goal of moving the Saudi economy away from its dependence on oil, that hasn't been that successful. If you talk about sort of soft power, when I talk to people in Europe, when I talk to Americans about Saudi Arabia, they still associate the country mainly with human rights abuses and with the problematic treatment of women in particular. But I think what has been incredibly successful is the internal transformation. People are out on the streets. There are things happening at night. There are movies that you can go to. There are concerts in the desert. There are these huge sporting events. But when it comes to some of the other goals in terms of transforming the world's opinion of the country, I think the - Saudi Arabia still has a long way to go.
DETROW: That's Scott Roxborough, the European bureau chief at The Hollywood Reporter. Thanks so much for talking to us.
ROXBOROUGH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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