Pro-Israel Advocacy Group Joins Paramount in Calling Out Mark Ruffalo Over Merger Comments

Hollywood’s ongoing feud over the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger has already drawn plenty of outspoken critics, but few have generated as much sustained controversy as Mark Ruffalo. His months-long opposition campaign against the $111 billion deal has now sparked a new and more organized response from outside the studio itself.

Ruffalo has spent much of the past year positioning himself as one of the merger’s most vocal Hollywood critics, testifying against the deal at a Senate hearing and signing an industry-wide open letter alongside hundreds of other actors opposing the acquisition. That opposition took a sharper turn on Friday when Ruffalo shared an Instagram post accusing the Ellison family, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and his son, Paramount CEO David Ellison, of complicity in what he called Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, tying that accusation directly to Oracle’s technology and its potential role in the merged media company.

That post has now drawn a formal response from Creative Community for Peace, a Hollywood-based pro-Israel advocacy nonprofit, which is calling for Hollywood to boycott Ruffalo entirely until he apologizes and retracts his statements. “Mark Ruffalo’s rhetoric has increasingly crossed the line from criticism of Israel into extremist and antisemitic messaging,” CCFP Executive Director Ari Ingel said in a statement Saturday, adding that Ruffalo’s argument against the merger “increasingly fuses hostility toward Israel and Zionism with Jewish-associated wealth, media ownership, oligarchic power.”

Ruffalo’s Friday post centered on a 2024 video clip of Safra Catz, Oracle’s executive vice chair and former CEO, discussing the company’s technology supporting Israel’s military response following the October 7, 2023 attacks led by Hamas, in which 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed and 251 others taken hostage. Ruffalo warned that the same technology “will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you,” directly linking Oracle’s involvement to the pending Paramount-Warner Bros. deal.

Paramount responded to Ruffalo’s post separately from CCFP, issuing its own statement calling the remarks “antisemitic” and “a bridge too far.” The company said it remains “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute,” adding that terms like “genocide” and “apartheid,” when applied to a corporate transaction, “cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.”

Ruffalo responded directly to the growing backlash in a lengthy post on X Saturday, calling the antisemitism accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest.” He argued that “criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people,” and stated that his views come from his “own political convictions” rather than hostility toward Jewish people, whom he described having “deep love and respect” for.

This isn’t the first time Ruffalo’s commentary on Israel has drawn scrutiny. In 2020, he described the Israel-Palestinian relationship as “a kind of apartheid,” and during the 2021 Gaza fighting, he called for sanctions on Israel and used the term “genocide,” a statement he later publicly retracted, saying at the time it was “inflammatory” and being used “to justify antisemitism here & abroad.” More recently, during a September 2025 podcast appearance, he called for the “boycott, divestment, sanctions, and prosecution” of Israel.

The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal is already facing separate legal challenges, with 12 U.S. states pursuing antitrust action against the merger on more conventional business grounds. Ruffalo’s escalating rhetoric and the response it’s generated from both Paramount and outside advocacy groups have added an entirely different dimension to a dispute that started as a fight over industry consolidation and jobs.

With CCFP now formally calling for industry-wide action against Ruffalo and the actor showing no signs of backing down from his position, this conflict appears likely to continue playing out publicly as the merger itself moves through further legal and regulatory scrutiny.

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