Mark Ruffalo hits back after Paramount said his merger criticism was “anti-Semitic”: “Appalling and fundamentally dishonest”

Mark Ruffalo has hit back after his criticism of the impending Paramount and Warner Bros. merger was called anti-Semitic by Paramount.

The $110billion (£83billion) deal would see Paramount Skydance acquire Warner Bros.

Discovery, bringing together major film, TV, news and streaming assets including Warner Bros., HBO and HBO Max , CNN, TNT Sports, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Channel 5, Paramount+, the DC Universe , Harry Potter , Game Of Thrones and The Lord Of The Rings .

Ruffalo is among the strong critics of the merger and has previously accused Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison and his father, co-founder and CTO of Oracle Corporation, Larry Ellison, of “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world.” The actor recently shared a clip of a Paramount board member, Safra Catz, to his Instagram story, outlining “really profoundly scary technologies” that Oracle used to help the Israeli military after the October 7 terror attack.

Ruffalo likened Larry Ellison to a “classic oligarch” and said that moguls “are crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance”.

“This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country,” Ruffalo added.

“Scrutinising the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary.

The $111billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public.” Nobody but the folks who are set to profit heavily off this merger and who have tanked our economy in the past like Jamie Dimon are for this thing.

If it wasn’t for the cozy relationship the Ellison’s have with Trump and a partisan and compromised DOJ this would have been stopped… https://t.co/AthrdlDEiv — Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) August 12, 2026 After Ruffalo’s initial post, a spokesperson for Paramount gave a statement to Variety , in which he said that the company is “troubled when anti-Semitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute”.

It continued: “Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.

This doesn’t deserve a response in kind — and to be clear, we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.” Ruffalo then took to X to respond, writing: “The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” Ruffalo wrote on X Saturday morning.