David Ellison

David Ellison is Chief Executive Officer of Skydance Media, the diversified media company he founded in 2010 to create elevated, event-level entertainment for global audiences. As CEO, he sets and executes the strategic vision for the company across all of its divisions: Feature Film, Television, Interactive, Animation, New Media and Sports. David currently oversees Skydance’s current film slate including Top Gun: Maverick, The Adam Project, The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Ghosted, Heart of Stone, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and the upcoming seventh and eighth installments of the Mission: Impossible series. Under his leadership, Skydance has produced a number of blockbuster and critically acclaimed films including The Tomorrow War, The Old Guard, 6 Underground, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Annihilation, Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond, the Jack Reacher films and the Academy Award-nominated True Grit. In 2013, David launched Skydance Television, which boasts a diverse slate of series across a range of platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ including several Emmy-nominated series such as Grace and Frankie and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan as well as Reacher, Foundation, The Big Door Prize, Condor and an Untitled Series starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first ever scripted television show. Furthermore, in 2016, David formed Skydance Interactive, a dedicated subsidiary that creates and owns original virtual reality games and licensing. The studio’s library includes the critically acclaimed VR survival-horror game The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners as well as its recently announced sequel: Chapter 2—Retribution. David launched an animation division at Skydance in 2017, with the purpose of producing a bold and original slate of high-end animated feature films and television series. Blush, the studio’s inaugural short debuted at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in 2021 and went on to receive a number of nominations and awards. The division’s animated feature film slate includes Luck and Spellbound. In 2020, David formed Skydance Animation Madrid which expanded the creative capability, scale and leverage of the studio. In 2019 David established Skydance New Media to create narratively focused interactive experiences crafted as original series, putting the audience at the center of the action and adventure, with the first production being with the Marvel Entertainment. The studio’s newest division, Skydance Sports, was launched in 2021 to develop premium scripted and unscripted sports-related content, documentaries and events. The division’s slate includes a number of projects in various stages of development. David announced in 2018 that Skydance had entered into a partnership with Tencent Holdings Limited, a leading provider of Internet value added services in China. In 2020, he announced the formation of strategic partnerships with Redbird Capital and CJ E&M, culminating in a $275 million equity capital expansion that saw Skydance’s valuation increasing to $2.3 billion. This partnership with CJ E&M expanded Skydance’s global television business, providing the company a strong foothold in South Korea’s entertainment market and access to CJ E&M’s expansive library of wildly popular entertainment. David is an accomplished pilot and a lifelong film enthusiast. He attended the School of Cinematic Arts at USC and is a member of the Producers Guild of America as well as the Television Academy.