Who actually runs Hollywood right now
The old org chart — six studios, a handful of agencies, three unions — is being redrawn in real time. A $110.9B acquisition is frozen mid-flight by a federal court. A studio's chairman and CEO is the son of the ninth-richest man alive. And for the first time in its history, a working filmmaker sits atop one of the guilds. This report maps who holds the leverage today, and where an outsider — with a game, a book, or an idea — actually has an opening.
Three storylines are doing all the work
Everything in this report — who has leverage, who's distracted, where a newcomer can actually get a meeting — traces back to three things happening simultaneously in 2026.
1. The Warner Bros. Discovery fight isn't over
Netflix signed a deal for WBD's streaming and studio assets in December 2025, then lost the company to a higher, all-cash bid from Paramount Skydance in February 2026 ($110.9B, $31/share). Shareholders and the DOJ approved it — but in July 2026, twelve state attorneys general sued to block it, and a federal judge froze the deal with a temporary restraining order. Trial is set for 2027. Until then, WBD operates as an independent public company under David Zaslav, effectively frozen in place — which matters if you're pitching WBD anything right now.
2. A generational handoff at the top of two majors
Bob Iger handed Disney to Josh D'Amaro in March 2026, ending a six-year succession saga. And David Ellison — son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison — became chairman and CEO of the newly merged Paramount Skydance in 2025, then immediately went shopping for WBD. His president, Jeff Shell, was gone within eight months (a securities-leak lawsuit). New money, new instincts, and a management bench that's still being built.
3. A filmmaker now runs a guild
Christopher Nolan was elected president of the Directors Guild of America in September 2025 — unopposed, and while promoting his own film. He heads into 2026 contract talks with the AMPTP (which itself just replaced its longtime negotiator) chairing the DGA's AI committee personally. Combined with SAG-AFTRA's newly elected Sean Astin, labor's negotiating posture on AI, residuals, and adaptation rights is being set by people who are, unusually, still working artists.
The Top 10 Studios, by revenue
Methodology note: ranked by each company's studio/entertainment segment revenue — the figure that best reflects actual Hollywood market share — with total parent-company revenue shown alongside for financial context. The two numbers diverge wildly for some names: Amazon and Apple's studio operations are rounding errors against their retail and hardware businesses, while Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount Skydance are pure-play media companies where the two figures are nearly identical. That gap is itself part of the power story — see the Pyramid section.
Fiscal years differ by company (Disney and Apple close in late September, Fox in June, Lionsgate in March, most others on the calendar year) — each figure is labeled with its actual period.
The Top 10 Production Houses
These are the independent financiers and producers that sit between the studios and the talent — the companies that actually originate and package much of what the studios above end up distributing. Nearly all are privately held, so revenue is rarely disclosed; figures below are trade estimates where available, clearly marked. Overlap with Section 1 is intentional: Paramount Skydance's Skydance division and Amazon's MGM are production engines in their own right, but they're covered under their parent studio to avoid duplicating leadership.
The Ten People Worth Knowing
Not just studio chiefs — the people who sit at chokepoints across ownership, talent representation, labor, and policy. This is the list to work from if your goal is to understand who can actually say yes.
The Pyramid of Influence
Six tiers, from the capital that decides which companies exist down to the workforce that makes the picture. Power flows down through greenlighting and money; leverage flows up through scarcity — of stars, of directors, of labor, and (once every decade or so) of legal permission to merge.
Capital & Controlling Ownership
The smallest tier and, right now, the most consequential — the family stakes and private-equity funds that decide which conglomerates exist, merge, or get taken apart. This is where the WBD outcome will actually be decided, in a courtroom, not a writers' room.
Studio & Platform Operators
The CEOs who actually greenlight, budget, and distribute. Their power is real but conditional — three of the nine names below answer to a controlling shareholder or a merger clock.
Talent Representation & Packaging
The three major agencies don't greenlight anything, but almost nothing gets greenlit without them — they control access to the stars, directors, and IP that make a pitch fundable in the first place.
Guilds & Labor
Collective leverage that can halt every production in the industry at once, as 2023 proved. Heading into 2026 contract talks, all three guilds are led by people newly in the job and focused on AI, residuals, and underfunded health plans.
Policy, Trade & Regulatory Chokepoints
The rulemakers and referees — ratings, piracy enforcement, trade policy, and, this year, the antitrust courts that are the one force in this whole pyramid that none of the tiers above can simply outspend.
Below-the-Line Workforce
The largest population in the industry by far, with the least individual leverage — but organized through IATSE and the Teamsters, this tier's collective consent is what actually makes a production happen day to day.
What the pyramid actually tells you
Power and revenue aren't the same axis. Look back at Section 1: only four of the ten studios — Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Skydance, and Lionsgate — are pure-play media companies where "studio revenue" and "total revenue" are close to the same number. The other six are divisions inside something much larger: Comcast's broadband business, Amazon's retail-and-cloud empire, Apple's hardware franchise. That distinction matters strategically. A pure-play studio has to make its numbers work on entertainment alone; a studio-inside-a-giant can subsidize a loss-leading streaming push with cash from somewhere else entirely — which is exactly what Amazon and Netflix have done to each other for a decade, and precisely why WBD, a pure-play, became acquisition bait the moment its numbers wobbled.
The apex tier is unusually exposed this year. Ordinarily, ownership and capital sit quietly above the fray. Not in 2026: a live federal antitrust trial over the WBD deal means a US District Court, not any studio boardroom, is currently the single most powerful actor in the entire pyramid. Twelve state attorneys general — a policy-tier actor — have effectively frozen a capital-tier transaction. That's a genuine inversion of the normal order, and it's temporary; whichever way the 2027 trial goes, the top of this pyramid resets.
Labor got organized at exactly the right moment. Christopher Nolan chairing the DGA's AI committee while also serving as its president is not a coincidence of scheduling — it's the guild consciously putting its most bankable, least replaceable member in the room for the negotiation that will define the next decade of the craft. Combined with Sean Astin at SAG-AFTRA, the 2026 AMPTP talks are being run, on the labor side, by working artists rather than career union officials — a meaningful shift in how those conversations tend to go.
The agencies are the quiet constant. Every other tier in this pyramid has been reshuffled by a merger, a court case, or an election in the past eighteen months. WME Group (post-Endeavor take-private) and CAA (post-ICM) have simply gotten bigger and more consolidated, absorbing volatility elsewhere in the system without much public turbulence of their own. For anyone trying to move a project through the industry, that makes agencies the most stable entry point on this entire map.
Getting outside IP into Hollywood
The question behind this whole report: if you're bringing something in from an adjacent industry — a game, a novel, an original franchise — which tier of the pyramid do you actually approach first? The honest answer is almost never "the studio." Here's the map, translated into a sequence of moves.
Start with the indies, not the majors
Six of the ten studios in Section 1 are currently distracted — mid-merger, mid-succession, or mid-litigation. Independent financiers move faster and take bigger creative swings precisely because they aren't answering to a shareholder vote or a federal judge this year.
Sell to the platforms that are actively buying adaptations
Amazon MGM and Netflix have both built adaptation into their core content strategy rather than treating it as a one-off bet — which means the buyer's appetite is already proven before you walk in the room.
Package before you pitch — go through an agency, not a studio
Tier 3 of the pyramid controls access to the directors, writers, and stars that turn a pitch into a fundable package. Attaching even one recognizable name through WME, CAA, or UTA before a studio meeting changes the odds more than the meeting itself.
Design around the guild rules on AI from day one
If any part of your pitch leans on AI-assisted previsualization, animation, or virtual production, build it to guild specifications before you show it to anyone — not after. This is now a leadership priority, not fine print.
Follow the private-equity capital, not the org chart
Firms like RedBird Capital and Apollo Global are actively deploying money into IP-driven ventures and can move faster than a conglomerate mid-litigation. A financing relationship at this tier can get a project packaged and de-risked before a major studio ever has to commit.
Mind the trade and ratings chokepoint once you're greenlit
The Motion Picture Association sets the ratings system, runs the industry's global anti-piracy coalition, and lobbies on the production-incentive and tariff questions that increasingly decide where a project actually gets made. None of that matters at the pitch stage — all of it matters the moment you're financed.
Given the studio's own portfolio — narrative-driven browser games, original IP concepts, and a genuine production pipeline already running — the realistic near-term move is Insertion Point 01 combined with Insertion Point 03: build a polished, festival- or pitch-ready package (trailer, pilot script, or playable proof-of-concept — all things Playology already produces in-house) and route it to a literary/gaming-savvy boutique agent or manager rather than a cold approach to a major studio in the middle of merger season.
The indies and PE-backed financiers named in this report (Legendary, A24, MRC, RedBird-adjacent capital) are structurally the most receptive audience in Hollywood right now to exactly the kind of original, IP-forward material Playology is already building — precisely because the majors above them are, for the moment, looking elsewhere.