Let’s begin with a statement of fact: mega mergers in Hollywood are bad for writers. They’re also bad for actors and directors, for production designers and caterers, for carpenters and Teamsters and electricians and set decorators. They are bad for consumers, who get fewer choices in entertainment controlled by fewer bosses with narrower worldviews. Mergers are bad for local businesses, who lose paying customers from disappearing productions. They are bad for high level TV and film executives, and entry-level assistants, and everyone in between.
They’re bad for everyone except those at the very top – the billionaires who saddle the new companies with debt and profit handsomely from the pain the rest of us feel.
Whatever else you hear or read about the intentions behind the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, this must remain front of mind. When a giant company – one of the mere handful of large media companies left in Hollywood – eats another giant company, fewer shows and movies get made, and tens of thousands of skilled Hollywood tradespeople either get fired or can no longer find work.
For that reason, my position is not about personal connections to one company or another, my feelings about the moguls who run them, or those moguls’ political affiliations. While I don’t often work with Paramount or Warner Bros. Discovery, I’d be writing these same words, with the same intensity, if I did. This is about another potential broadsword blow to an already wounded industry, one that’s been gouged and squeezed and strangled by high-level corporate greed.
