THE BIG SWITCH

So, David Ellison’s big buyout of Warner Bros. Discovery recently cleared its last legal roadblock, paving the way for a merger that will grant the Ellison family (and possibly Elon Musk) a controlling stake in a staggering one-third of all Hollywood productions, and then some.

In February of 2026, Paramount Skydance — under current CEO David Ferris Ellison, Skydance Pictures founder and nepo-baby son of elder techbro Larry Ellison of the Oracle Corporation — announced their agreement to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery after a bloody month-long bidding war with Netflix. Immediately after this announcement, the entire American mainstream entertainment media industry, especially those of a specific political persuasion (Left. The people who have the biggest problems with Paramount Skydance’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery are people on the Left of the political spectrum), lost its entire damn mind over the announcement.

Long story short: California and a handful of other Democrat-heavy states with ties to the American entertainment industry tried to block the merger, but both the United States federal government and the United Kingdom (where many of Hollywood’s movies and television or streaming shows get filmed these days) approved of the merger. Though negotiations were being held up by one lone idiot in the California government (Rob Banta. His name is Rob Banta) who may or may not have been paid off by Netflix to sabotage the deal (allegedly), that idiot eventually caved to pressure to approve the Paramount / Warner Bros. merger in order to save his future political career save the Hollywood film industry in an absurd and intricate game of political speed chess more dramatic and drawn-out than any soap opera filmed by Hollywood itself. In the end, that lone idiot and Ellison wound up brokering a historic five-year deal that greatly benefited Ellison’s soon-to-be merged media companies.

Even though Ellison’s big damn deal with the state of California and its eleven affiliated Democrat-led states — an agreement reached early morning Monday, 21 September 2026 — supposedly forbids Ellison’s new media company (titled simply “Skydance”) from leaving California for financially greener pastures, Skydance has every reason to leave California once the terms of its half-decade concord with California have passed. During the idiotic scuffle between Ellison and Big Damn Idiot Rob Banta, Ellison made tentative explorations into the possibilities of setting up shop either near Nashville, Tennessee (where his father Larry holds court at Oracle), or near the burgeoning secondary American filmmaking capital at sunny Austin, Texas.

Should the deal between California and Skydance go south at any time during their five-year détente, Ellison could still move his new multimedia conglomerate to either Nashville, Austin, or anywhere else with fewer taxes and less political red tape. Hell, he could do so whether things between him and Cali cool off or heat up—five years is more than enough time to buy new office space and studio lots elsewhere, to get the appropriate state- and federal-level paperwork files, and to update Skydance’s / Paramount’s / Warner Bros’ official letterhead in Microsoft Word. Ellison might even set up shop in both states in the future — with maybe a studio in Austin and an administrative headquarters in Nashville — while retaining the old studios out in Burbank in order to diversify his holdings and prevent another political squabble like his standoff with California from ever happening again.

California may try to prevent this from happening, as this would cause a massive job loss in Hollywood… but modern Hollywood is already dying and losing tons of jobs it’ll never get back anyway (an inevitable fate it rightly deserves, to be honest), and that situation would actually put all the trump cards (pun intended) in Ellison’s hands in the end, making his future bargaining position much stronger. The next five years will tell the tale.

Of course, the potential job loss and the future of the Hollywood film industry is all that’s on anybody’s minds, should Ellison opt to move Skydance out of California anyway… but nobody is really talking about the political ramifications, aside from snarky mutterings of, “Boy, wouldn’t AG Banta and Governor Newsom be unelectable then!”

I’m not going to comment on any of that, because countless entertainment industry article writers and YouTube video hosts from Nerdrotic to WDW Pro and Clownfish TV have already opined enough on the merger to fill libraries of history books with their analyses alone. Nobody wants to read what some nameless batty schmuck living at the ass end of West Texas thinks about a megacorporate business deal almost going haywire in Hollywood, so I’ll keep my horribly inflated two cents about all that to myself.¹

What I will comment on is the potential political aspect of this particular Hollywood hurly-burly that would be pertinent to Texas, if it really occurred: what would happen Ellison actually did move some or all of Skydance’s moviemaking to the Lone Star State?

I would like to propose a political nightmare scenario.

Speaking as a lifelong Texan, Skydance moving any of its filmmaking to Texas would be a major mistake in the long term, politically speaking… for Texas. Here’s why:

• If Skydance moved a large bulk of its filmmaking to Austin / East Texas, lots of people who have the ability to move from California to Texas to save their filmmaking jobs will move to Texas to keep their jobs with Skydance / Paramount / Warner Bros. California residents (like the aforementioned Nerdrotic) have moved to Texas before for various political and economic reasons, and they’ve become quite happy here. If Skydance moves any major part of its productions here, this will happen again, and it will happen en masse.
• Other people who couldn’t afford to move to an incredibly expensive state like California for movie jobs will move to Texas to obtain those jobs after Skydance sets up shop in the Lone Star State. Living in Texas is ridiculously cheap compared to California. Mean household income is higher in California than it is in Texas, but it has to be in order to compensate for California’s extremely high cost of living. Even though some jobs in Texas pay less than they do in California (outside the oil & gas industry anyway), the average person’s money goes way further in Texas than it does in California. Gas prices in Texas are half the cost of gas prices in California. Housing also costs half as much in Texas, from monthly rents to mortgages, and childcare costs are doubled in California as well. Texas has no state income tax (and we have a slightly lower average sales tax, too), while California’s state income tax hovers over every aspect of California life like the mythical Sword of Damocles. The only reason people bother with California at all is the entertainment industry, which is rapidly dying out (as I mentioned above), with much of the smaller filmmaking efforts moving… to Texas, of course, thanks to the efforts of Hollywood heavyweights like Taylor Sheridan, Kevin Bacon, Matthew McConaughey, and Zachary Levi. For many who have been shut out of their dream jobs in Hollywood by California’s absurdly high cost of living, moving to Texas to chase their filmmaking dreams is a far more achievable goal.
• Unfortunately, many of these former Blue State (Democrat-led state) residents chasing their fifteen minutes of fame here in Texas will likely bring their awful Blue State voting habits with them, those same voting habits that turned Hollywood into the hellscape that it is today. (God help me, they’ll also probably bring their awful driving habits with them, too, just as all the out-of-state people who came to West Texas for high-paying oil field jobs did during the George W. Bush Administration…)
• The bulk of filmmaking is moving to the big art centers of Texas, meaning the major cities: Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, El Paso, Marfa (which is essentially West Texas’ tiny little art hub),… and Austin, Texas, which is essentially the sociopolitical “Los Angeles” of Texas anyway. If filmmaking efforts don’t move directly to Austin, then they will move near Austin (like Zachary Levi’s Wyldwood Studios over near Bastrop) so they can have access to Austin’s entertainment industry resources, political resources (to cut through the state’s legislative restrictions, though there are far less of these in Texas than there are in California), and community of creatives.
• Then there’s the Domino Effect: if one major movie studio moves to Texas to avoid taxes, legislation, and overbearing entertainment unions, then other major movie studios may move to Texas as well, once the studio executives realize all the benefits of doing so after witnessing how Skydance prospers here. This will increase the problems — especially the political problems — affiliated with Hollywood movie studios moving to Texas exponentially.

Give it five to twenty-five years and Texas will go “purple” politically. Here’s what I mean by that:

Right now, Texas is considered a “Red State”—it is heavily led by Republican lawmakers. It’s been that way for decades now, and Texas isn’t just a Red State: it’s the quintessential Red State. When the average American thinks of the words “Republican voter,” they typically think of either a crocodile-riding elderly Florida pensioner or a gun-slinging, horse-riding, ten gallon hat-wearing, steak-eating, Dr. Pepper-drinking, oil field-working, ranch-owning, football-worshipping, Bible-thumping, military-loving, Big Government-hating, conservative Christian Texas cowboy with an accent thicker than those of Tommy Lee Jones or Matthew McConaughey and a bright yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” flag plastered on his horse’s saddle. Republicanism is practically part of the culture here in Texas.

We are so conservative Republican here in Texas that we — along with Florida — lead the way for the overall Republican Party in the broader United States. As well-researched tomes like As Texas Goes… by the ineffable Gail Collins have proven conclusively, presidential nominees favored by Texas and Florida during the primary elections usually end up becoming the frontrunners for the Grand Old Party (GOP, another name for the Republican Party), and Texas’ unique brand of conservativism — as exemplified by lawmakers like Senator John Cornyn, Senator Ted Cruz, Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, former governor Rick Perry, and former president George W. Bush, for better or for worse — usually influences the type of lawmakers Republicans elect to high-level state and national positions. Given the way Republican lawmakers often speak and behave, one might be forgiven for inadvertently thinking that GOPers from other states like the late Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin might secretly have been Texans somehow.

Thing is, though, it wasn’t always this way. As books like Red State: An Insider’s Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics by Texas historians Jack & Doris Smothers have illustrated, Texas has already flipped from being a Democrat-led Blue State to a Republican-heavy Red State before. In fact, Texas was dominated by the Democratic Party from the end of the Civil War all the way up to 1976, when the Republican Party began winning major political battles in the Lone Star State.

As Vigo the Carpathian said in Ghostbusters II, “What was will be! What is will be no more!”²

If Austin — or any of the major population centers, really — becomes the next filmmaking Mecca for the United States, you will see an entirely new Texas emerge almost overnight. Like I said before, give it five to twenty-five years’ time.

Let me first address the naysayers:

• As I’ve already stated before, Texas has flipped from Democrat to Republican before. It can — and, should enough entertainment industry Blue State voters swarm the Lone Star State, will — flip back to Democrat, or (as I believe is much more likely) flip “Purple,” neither fully Republican or Democrat.
• On the flip side (pun intended), California used to be pretty Republican-leaning once upon a time. Sure, Hollywood (and Southern California in general) was already pretty Left-leaning (almost Communistically so) and had been since the Red Scare, but the state overall was fairly right-leaning (especially Northern California, where several United States Air Force bases and affiliated corporate contractors have massive business presences) until 1992, when Clinton won the state during his election campaign. Before Clinton, the state had been governed by center-right Republicans like Ronald Reagan (himself a former actor and Hollywood insider), who would go on to become president of the nation. Even after California became a major seat of national Democratic power, the state still held the potential to flip Red State again, as the election of center-right Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (another actor and Hollywood insider) clearly illustrates (until it flipped Blue State again in 2016).
• Before anyone says, “The film industry will never leave California!”, the film industry has already left one major hub city (New Jersey) for Hollywood. Before 1920, World War I and the Flu Pandemic of 1918 hit the East Coast pretty heavily, and the filmmaking industry responded by fleeing to California, where the weather was sunnier (and less flu-infected) and filmmaking conditions were better. Eventually, Hollywood became the dominant center of the moviemaking scene… but that Southern California dominion over the movie biz is already growing slacker with each passing year, with more moviemaking headed for Austin, Texas (a major art community), Nashville, Tennessee (another entertainment industry hub), Atlanta, Georgia (a secondary filmmaking hub that Hollywood has screwed over in the past), Las Vegas, Nevada (which already has the market cornered in other vices), and, surprisingly, New Jersey again. What goes around comes around, eh?
• Still don’t think a major industry that has spent a century housed in one major city/region would flee that region and set up shop elsewhere, leaving that major city a ghost town? Just ask Detroit. (Ask New York, as well; it used to be the nation’s political capital, before the throne of power moved to Washington, DC.)

As the old adage goes, Mutatis mutandis — everything (and I do mean everything) changes. What happened before can, and will, happen again.

These facts standing, if a ton of former Blue State inhabitants moved to Texas in droves for entertainment industry jobs (either California jobbers struggling to keep their existing jobs or Blue State voters from other states flooding to Texas to obtain potential future filmmaking gigs in the Lone Star State), the influx of new Democrat voters will swell the already alarmingly large number of Democrat voters in Central and East Texas (where the major metropolitan centers in Texas — except for El Paso — are located). Central and East Texas may become a new haven for the Democratic Party in the United States.

Will this be enough to flip Texas entirely Blue? Probably not (though I have been wrong in my estimates before). There would still be too many Republican voters in the major cities outside of Austin to challenge the new Democrat residents (to say nothing of all the Republicans located in the wealthy oil fields of West Texas, which hold absurd amounts of power in the state’s Republican-heavy legislature). It might affect the state’s political climate enough to even out the distribution of political power in the state almost clean down the center, turning Texas into a new Purple (evenly-split Republican / Democrat) battleground state.

If Texas flips purple, then the Republican Party loses a major political stronghold. West Texas will always be a power base for the Party, but I doubt the state will be able to sway national elections the way it does now, especially in favor of the GOP. Republicans will have to work that much harder to sway the nation’s centrists to vote for their candidates or to steal center-left voters away from the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, as I stated earlier, one major motion picture studio fleeing the dying film industry in Hollywood might cause a systemic effect leading to other major and minor filmmaking studios fleeing Hollywood as well, the way several automotive industries fled from Detroit during that city’s fall from grace. If that happened, much of the state’s Democratic political power would leave with it.

Pop quiz! What are California’s largest industries outside of the American entertainment industry?

• Aerospace / Defense
• Agriculture (farming and ranching)
• Education
• Healthcare
• Real Estate
• Renewable Energy
• Technology (Silicon Valley)
• Tourism

Let’s look at these industries:

• Three of these industries — Healthcare, Real Estate, and Tourism — are politically agnostic. These industries will constantly make money no matter what political party holds power in California. (One of those industries, Tourism, may actually suffer if Southern California’s major cities, especially Los Angeles, continue to decline the way they have in the past decade.)
• Two of these industries — the Defense and Agriculture industries — once dominated California and still hold a massive presence there. Both of these industries lean pretty hard to the Right of the political industry.
• The Tech Sector has been moving from California elsewhere, especially to Texas to flee the state’s heavy taxation and oppressive business legislation, in recent years. This actually preceded Hollywood’s fall and is part of California’s overall decline. If the Tech Sector leaves California completely and if the Left-leaning power base in California is broken, expect the Renewable Energy industry to take a hit as well.

If Hollywood and Silicon Valley fall, expect the spine of the Democratic Party in California to be broken… which could pave the way for California to flip Purple (or even Red) as well.

We will see what happens in five years’ time…

1. Fun Fact: Two American pennies in 1926 — about the time the idiom “my two cents” was first coined — is worth about 38 cents today in 2026.[↩]
2. The rest of that quote includes the words, “Now is the season of evil!”, but we’re talking about Democrats taking over Texas. I thought that was implied already.[↩]