Why the Sussexes’ friendship with their Montecito neighbour, Paramount boss Brian Robbins, is their smartest move yet.
For a TV show called Succession, there was precious little about the royal family in Jesse Armstrong’s satirical black comedy-drama.
Happily, for any who were disappointed by that omission, British royals appear to have a cameo part in the real-life takeover saga engulfing the media family that owns Paramount Global – and that partly inspired the HBO series. And not just any royals, but the box-office Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Harry and Meghan are close friends with Brian Robbins, the conglomerate’s joint chief executive, and his wife, fashion designer Tracy. The couples live a stone’s throw from each other in Montecito, California, and were first spotted together at the January premiere of Paramount’s reggae biopic, Bob Marley: One Love, in Kingston, Jamaica.
Harry and Meghan’s visit to the Caribbean nation raised eyebrows, not least because they were photographed with Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who has made no secret of his desire to replace the monarchy with a republic.
Meghan married her first husband, American film producer Trevor Engelson, on a Jamaican beach in 2011, while Harry toured the country the following year to mark the late Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. But other than that, the couple have no obvious connection to the island. What on earth were they doing there?
It later emerged that they were flown to Jamaica on a Bombardier private jet laid on by Paramount Pictures, sparking speculation that the pair might try to capitalise on their new-found friendship to revive their flagging media careers. They have been dropped by Spotify from their £15 million (NZ$30.98 million) deal after Meghan’s podcast flopped – and a senior executive publicly called them “f***ing grifters” – while their Netflix slate has been reduced to a polo documentary and a cooking show. Their £80m deal with the streamer is set to end in 2025; they clearly need all the Hollywood friends they can get.
The foursome are so close that Tracy Robbins was one of just 50 people to receive a jar of Meghan’s strawberry jam, one of the first products from her American Riviera Orchard brand. Her jar was numbered 17 and she gushed on social media about how she would not be sharing it with anybody. Whether that included her husband was unclear.
Then, in May, the Sussexes celebrated their sixth anniversary with a double date accompanied by the Robbinses at Lucky’s Steakhouse in Montecito, where a steak costs as much as US$175 (NZ$283) and a Dover sole will set you back US$72.
Brian Robbins, unusually for a Hollywood executive, has much in common with the duchess. Like her, the one-time actor and director once starred in a hit TV show before being responsible for a series of flops (including the fart-fixated Eddie Murphy comedy Norbit). And like her, he was met with much derision when he tried to change careers. No doubt they had plenty to talk about.
But there’s one topic that probably didn’t come up at dinner: the Paramount-owned South Park, which mocked Harry and Meghan for their “worldwide privacy tour” in a 2023 episode. Nonetheless, if Harry and Meghan think Paramount may be the place to revive their fortunes, they could be disappointed – through no fault of his own, Robbins may not be in his job for much longer.
While the couples’ friendship was becoming public knowledge, Paramount, the storied giant behind films such as Top Gun and Forrest Gump, began to be circled by suitors including the scion of a tech billionaire, Japanese rival Sony and private equity firms.
Paramount is controlled by Shari Redstone who, in Succession terms, is the Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) to late patriarch Sumner Redstone’s Logan (Brian Cox). The Redstones’ National Amusements, of which Shari is president, owns 77 per cent of Paramount voting shares, giving the family a huge say about the future of a company under pressure to sell as it struggles to adapt to the streaming world and loses hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Last week, the Paramount board agreed a US$8 billion deal with Skydance Media, a production company run by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. At Tuesday’s annual meeting, however, Shari Redstone left investors guessing about whether she would approve the sale and instead expressed her “confidence” in Robbins and his fellow executives, who are nonetheless unlikely to stay on with any new regime.
Robbins, 60, was installed as part of a troika of bosses to replace Bob Bakish after he was ousted by Redstone in April. “Brian did not have the typical résumé,” Redstone said in a Variety profile of the executive last year. “He has his own way of looking at the business. I want us to be moving and changing and looking at the future, and I feel like Brian is making sure we don’t get left behind.”
Robbins’ elevation marked the culmination of a long and varied journey. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to the Bloodbrothers actor Floyd Levine and his wife, Rochelle, he moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 14 to help Levine land bigger and better parts.
As a child, Robbins would run lines with his father before he auditioned and, eventually, dropped out of UCLA to give acting a go himself. Levine suggested he adopt his mother’s maiden name so he would be seen as his own man, rather than a nepo baby. Roles in Knight Rider and Growing Pains followed before his big breakthrough as a precocious teenager in the ABC series Head of the Class. “It was amazing,” Robbins told Variety last year. “I was 18 years old and I was on one of the biggest shows on television.”
While the role of Eric Mardian brought him a certain level of wealth and fame, Robbins became much more interested in what the sitcom’s writers and crew were doing. Eventually, he decided his future lay behind the camera. “Acting was not my path,” he said. “I didn’t want to be in my 50s auditioning for guest spots on CSI.”
Within a year of joining Head of the Class in 1986, he was writing episodes. “He just had a lot of moxie,” Howard Hesseman, who played a teacher in the series, told the New York Times in 2002.
Robbins found he had a knack for identifying what younger viewers wanted to watch and, in 1995, created All That, a sketch comedy programme similar to Saturday Night Live, for Nickelodeon. Other hits followed with the 1997 film Good Burger (based on a Nickelodeon sketch starring Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell), Superman origin series Smallville and Samuel L Jackson’s Coach Carter.
It was while at Head of the Class that he met Dan Schneider, who became a frequent collaborator, especially at Nickelodeon. Schneider, the creator of iCarly and Drake & Josh, has become a lightning rod for controversy in recent years over allegations of sexual misconduct and creating a toxic workplace for child stars.
The 58-year-old was the subject of Quiet on Set, a five-part documentary outlining the allegations during his tenure at the children’s network. “I definitely owe some people a pretty strong apology,” Schneider said after the documentary aired, although he denied its accusations of abuse and is currently suing the producers.
One actress, Lori Beth Denberg, told Business Insider last month that she had told Robbins she was worried about the way Schneider was treating Amanda Bynes, star of The Amanda Show, which the Robbinses’ company produced, but that he did nothing. Robbins has not addressed the allegations about Schneider.
Some of Robbins’ filmmaking efforts were execrable flops. The worst was perhaps Norbit, the 2007 supposed comedy that he directed and which starred Eddie Murphy as both the title character and his abusive, obese wife. So bad was Norbit that it was blamed for costing Murphy an Oscar that year for a different film, Dreamgirls.
Robbins attempted to put a brave face on things. “The only films that get good reviews are the ones that nobody sees,” he said. “I just don’t think you can make movies for critics.” He is still referred to by some in the entertainment world as “Norbit Man”, while “don’t Norbit yourself” is seen as the cardinal rule of awards campaigning.
A couple of years after that bruising time, he stopped directing because of the strain it was putting on his family life – he and Tracy have three children – and moved into the executive ranks. He commissioned reams of shows and films, including Nobody’s Fool, directed by Sussex super-friend Tyler Perry, before Redstone convinced him to become president of Nickelodeon in 2018.
Three years later, he became head of Paramount Pictures, putting him at the helm of a giant studio that was nearly a century old. His hits include Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible and Transformers, while he is currently shepherding Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sequel to its autumn release date. He was hailed for making a counterintuitive bet by releasing the PAW Patrol film in cinemas (inviting much derision from his “Norbit Man” critics), rather than immediately streaming it on Paramount+, last year. It defied expectations, grossing more than US$200m at the box office against a budget of just US$30m.
If Robbins does end up with some free time at the end of Paramount’s takeover saga, could he be the man to help the Sussexes achieve their goal of becoming Montecito media moguls? Their Archewell production company has seen a huge churn of staff (its head of TV Bennett Levine, who left in January 2024, is yet to be replaced) and their friend Brian is impeccably well-connected with a proven track record of getting things done. Norbit or not, they’d be lucky to have him.
