With David Ellison this close to sealing his $111 billion megadeal to merge two of Hollywood’s historic studios, chatter has turned to a more grim question: How many jobs will be impacted?
The big picture number is some $6 billion in synergies that Team Ellison sees in combining Paramount and Warner Bros. as the corporate, administrative, tech and resource functions of the companies are merged.
But what happens when one major studio devours another matters even more in the entertainment industry’s home base, Los Angeles County, which is already grappling with big declines in film and TV shoots in the area, as well as emptying soundstages and the collateral damage to ancillary industries (from catering to costuming to VFX houses) from large-scale productions disappearing or moving to tax-friendlier locales.
Local officials have hosted tense town halls framing the deal in existential terms, activist groups have buzzed Paramount’s iconic Melrose Gate with anti-merger mobile billboards and a Jane Fonda-led celebrity grassroots protest effort has fired up a base of resistance. That doesn’t count what’s happening up in Sacramento, where California attorney general Rob Bonta is said to be prepping a legal challenge to the merger in coordination with multiple states even as Trump’s Justice Department has given a greenlight to Ellison.
