“Entourage” creator Doug Ellin did not appreciate Jake Paul’s take on his HBO comedy series, which reunited former co-stars Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier.
An ad for the boxer’s social sportbook platform Betr saw Piven and Grenier revive their roles as super agent Ari Gold and movie star Vinny Chase, respectively. Ellin took to his social media on Wednesday, calling the ad “trash and theft.”
“I have zero positivity in watching things I busted my ass [off] on for years [be] turned into garbage,” he wrote on X. “Go create your own s–t. And if you need money … Flip burgers. This is trash and theft. Period.”
The commercial sees Piven weave his way through a mansion party, where Lonzo and LiAngelo Ball ask him to make a bet on the TV. His character then bumps into Jake Paul, who gives him the elevator pitch for his predictive markets app Betr.
Piven eventually finds “pretty boy” movie star client Vinny Chase (Grenier) on a yacht in the backyard, where he offers him the chance to be the face of the Betr app.
“We’re in baby,” Piven tells the app’s co-creator. “You’re gonna have to pay us.”
Ellin made clear that he was not a part of any of the process for the Betr ad — “I think it’s pretty damn obvious I didn’t write it. My god,” he noted in an X reply.
“Many people worked really hard to make our show as good as it was,” Ellin added on Instagram. “When I see cheap, sh–ty imitations that try to pass for what we did it makes me puke.”
“I watch it and I want to throw up, because I would suffer, along with many other people, over every syllable, every f–king word,” he continued. “So I watch this trash, this s–t, and go, ‘Ugh, ugh.’ There’s no bitterness. I want everyone to get paid, get rich. Just f–king do your own s–t. That’s all.”
He also specifically called out Piven, who won three Emmys for his performance in the series, in a video he posted to Instagram on Tuesday.
The ad marked the first time Piven and Grenier have shared the screen since the 2015 “Entourage” movie, which arrived four years after the series wrapped its eight-season run on HBO.
“We’re really proud of how the spot came together, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, generating nearly 10 million organic social views in less than 24 hours,” a spokesperson for Betr said in a statement. “We had a lot of fun making it, they had a lot of fun making it, and people seem to be having a lot of fun watching it. We appreciate Doug watching the ad and helping promote it. Betr 2.0 is available now.”
“Entourage” ran for eight seasons on HBO from 2004 to 2011. A follow-up feature film was then released in 2015.
