After Paramount Axed MTV Documentary, What's Next?

In a post-PSKY-WBD merger, could documentaries at HBO, CNN, and Alex Gibney's long-awaited "Musk" also be left in the lurch?

First, the bad news: Paramount has shuttered MTV Documentary Films, as I reported for Documentary magazine (“Paramount Doesn’t Want My MTV (Documentary)"). But for those who follow “Predators” filmmaker David Osit on Instagram, this shouldn’t come as a surprise: On April 15, he posted a story that said “every single employee at MTV DOCUMENTARY FILMS has left, been reassigned, or terminated. In effect, MTV DOCUMENTARY FILMS no longer exists.” As of last week, Paramount made it official, confirming in an email that the multiple-Oscar-nominated doc division was no longer operating.

I must admit that I always found it a little weird that MTV had a prestige documentary label that took on bold, artfully crafted, risk-taking, nonfiction-cinema that in many cases had nothing to do with the MTV brand. But they did!

With Oscar nominations for such terrific films as “The Mole Agent” (2020), “Ascension” (2021), “The Eternal Memory” (2023), and “Black Box Diaries” (2024), and a raft of strong shorts (including 2019’s “St. Louis Superman” and 2023’s “The ABCs of Book Banning”), the label had a hugely impressive run lead by esteemed former HBO Documentary executive Sheila Nevins (and Liza Burnett Fefferman) that would make most companies envious.

But Paramount let it die anyway. That’s just what seems to happen to a lot of award-winning and award-worthy feature-length documentaries under the auspices of corporate America: They get “shitcanned,” to use an especially descriptive word that veteran filmmaker Alex Gibney related to me for the Documentary magazine article.

Gibney’s “shitcan” example is instructive. In 2008, Taxi to the Dark Side, Gibney’s Oscar-winning indictment of the U.S.’s torture/ interrogation practices during the Afghanistan War—released during George W. Bush’s presidency—was going to be pulled from its Discovery Channel TV premiere. “Because they wanted to curry favor with the Bush Administration,” Gibney told me, “I learned they were going to shitcan it.” Eventually, Discovery gave up the rights, because Gibney complained publicly, and the film landed at none other than HBO.

This is fascinating for a couple of reasons: Because at the time the head of Discovery was David Zaslav, who #BlocktheMerger followers will know is now the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery and who just sold his company down the river to Paramount for a fat personal payout package worth $880 million.

It’s also interesting because the company that eventually took on “Taxi to the Dark Side” was HBO Documentary Films, run by none other than Sheila Nevins, and which, of course, is now going to be a division of Pete Hegseth buddy David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance-Warner-Bros-Discovery merger (if it goes through.)

HBO is also the eventual streaming home of Alex Gibney’s long anticipated “Musk” exposé (which is getting a theatrical release later this year) and could be just the kind of political lighting rod that Zaslav was trying to avoid with “Taxi to the Dark Side” and that Ellison is currently trying to avoid as Donald Trump’s personal media mogul (see CBS News, or “Top Gun: Maverick”).

“Top Gun: Maverick” (2022, Paramount Pictures)

“Predators” director David Osit did not hold back when I spoke to him about the fate of HBO Documentary and CNN Films under a PSKY-WBD joint entity. “If the merger goes through, they are done,” he told me. “Why would we assume that they would survive? This is the point of it. This is why Trump wants the merger to happen; they want to continue to stamp down moderate and leftwing voices in favor of rightwing voices.”

In addition to Osit, Andrew Jarecki and Alex Gibney also spoke critically of the merger, as did, in a Hollywood Reporter article also coincidentally published yesterday, Laura Poitras, as well as Geeta Gandbhir—who told me similarly and bluntly: “It feels like the merger is a pathway to fascism and authoritarianism, where multiple major outlets are controlled by one entity and we have a government that is closely aligned, and wants to get involved.”

However, and this is a very belated however, here is the (potential) good news.

I think there are a few reasons why a number of our worst fears might not be realized. Because the authoritarian capitalists in power are probably more capitalists than authoritarians, they go where the money is, and it would be deeply embarrassing and potentially damaging for the PSKY-WBD monster to stomp on the HBO Documentaries brand and a hot commodity like Gibney’s “Musk” doc.

But only if it does well, of course. They'd certainly be quick to cut bait and placate Trump if they don’t think they’ll get a lot of eyeballs for it. But if “Musk” is indeed one of the most hotly anticipated documentaries of the year and it gets a solid push from Bleecker Street Films when they release it theatrically, then they’d be stupid to abandon it. And not just stupid, but they would be going against their capitalistic fundamentals.

CNN News may be a different story—which could go the way of CBS News, as some outlets have suggested—but I’m guessing the folks at CNN Films that are partnering with production companies on feature documentaries will continue to operate in their own bubble, especially if they continue to produce a very small slate of largely apolitical docs.

Based on my reporting, the other important factor here that may keep these documentary units alive is their esteemed leaders. While it’s true that Paramount’s rightwing CBS takeover has unapologetically pushed out a lot of great executives and talent, and the same could happen at HBO and CNN, I’m doubtful that Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller—and their longstanding HBO nonfiction fiefdom—would be cut loose.

With the right mix of episodic “retention content” to keep the people coming back for more, along with commissioning and distributing strongly lauded documentaries (“The Alabama Solution,” et. al.), Abraham and Heller have steered the helm of a decades-old ship, garnering respect and esteem along the way. And that kind of institutional knowledge and long list of faithful creative relationships isn’t easy to find elsewhere.

Similarly, CNN veteran Amy Entelis has helped cultivate nonfiction programming at the news company for decades walking the delicate fine-line of the popular and the prestige. Credited with developing the hit nonfiction series “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” as well as CNN’s first Oscar for “Navalny,” Entelis isn’t seen as some left-wing ideologue championing social-issue documentaries, but a shrewd executive with an eye for the bottom line. Which is exactly what the authoritarian capitalists want.

I could be wrong, of course, and Osit could be right. After all, as I mentioned in a previous post, Osit’s film wasn’t just critically acclaimed—and nominated for an Emmy tonight for Outstanding Investigative Documentary—but it was also a big deal on the struggling Paramount+ platform, debuting as the top-watched film on December 8, ahead of “Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning,” “Guns Up,” and “Dear Santa,” and it remained in the top ten through December 19. So maybe popularity and prestige still isn’t enough for the authoritarian capitalists?

Either way, many of the veteran filmmakers and former executives I spoke to were surprisingly confident they were going to continue to do what they do, whether or not they have corporate partners onboard. (For emerging filmmakers, it might be a different story.) These high-profile filmmakers are finding money and distribution in other innovative ways. It’s just crazy that Gibney’s company put out “The Bibi Files” on the Tucker Carlson Network(!), but you got to be flexible these days.

That’s what RJ Cutler, the prolific doc director (“Martha”) and producer (“Marc by Sofia”), told me in a conversation that I was only able to briefly quote in the Documentary story.

“You have to be as crafty and industrious as possible,” he told me. “This has always been the challenge. In the documentary space, we have been the outsiders to the mainstream entertainment industry, and we are outsiders again. Now, with quantifiable, data-driven evidence that we have enormous audiences, we just have to take all of that and go to work.”