Read This: Insiders discuss David Ellison's "normie taste" in movies

The reason for the scrutiny is obvious: Ellison now runs one of the oldest film studios in the world and will seemingly stop at nothing to snag another one. While the purchase has also seen a major shift in Paramount’s existing news company, CBS News, insiders say that David doesn’t appear to have much interest in running a news company. He does, however, have a long history of loving movies and has definite ideas about what kinds of movies he wants to make more of. “David knows one type of movie, and it’s the Mission: Impossible type,” one former high-ranking Skydance employee says in the profile. Before taking the reins at Paramount, David founded Skydance Media, where he would sit in writers’ rooms and offer notes like, “What are the stakes? What’s the downward pressure?” says one person. “And that’s kind of the extent of it.”

“David processes movies through the lens of things that came before: ‘You know that scene in Indiana Jones where the thing happens in the temple — make this more like that,'” another executive who worked with him says. Another jokes that the easier way to get him interested in a project is to involve planes or a scene of someone falling from the sky. While some of this did work out (namely, the projects that Skydance produced with Paramount that starred Tom Cruise) there were more flops. Of the Will Smith-starring Gemini Man, one executive said, “I’d never sat in a room during a premiere where you could just feel the cringe wash over everybody who is thinking, How did this happen?” The flops culminated in what a Paramount executive called a “come-to-Jesus meeting,” wherein Ellison and his Skydance employees asked the Paramount employees if they thought they had bad taste in movies. “The short answer is ‘yes,'” said the exec quoted in the story. 

You can read the whole piece here.