The entertainment industry continues to take some massive punishment as it continues to contract economically, as evidenced by the next round of layoffs happening at big time studio Paramount, which just gave 15 percent of its current staff the boot. Ouch. Lot of people are out of work now. What happens in the marketplace overall will impact every industry at some point, even entertainment.
“In order to set Paramount up for continued success, we are taking these actions, and after today, 90% of these reductions will be complete,” Paramount co-CEOS George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins stated in a memo that was blasted out to employees according to a piece published by The Wrap.
Paramount is looking to slash 15 percent of employees and cut a whopping $500 million in expenses as it continues to get ready for its merger with Skydance Media. The vast majority of the cuts are coming from the marketing, communications, finance, legal, technology, and other departments at the studio.
Here’s more from Breitbart News:
The second round of layoffs was first reported in August by Paramount Global co-CEO Chris McCarthy who announced the changes during a Q2 earnings call. Butt no timeline was given at the time. Hollywood has suffered a series of setbacks over the last few years. Also in August, Warner Bros. Discovery saw its stock take an $11.2 billion dive after the “company reported disappointing second quarter earnings on Wednesday that missed expectations on both the top and bottom lines,” per Yahoo Finance.
But Hollywood has not really recovered from the Pandemic years when theaters were closed by COVID lockdowns, which was then quickly followed by the twin strikes of the actors and writers unions. Paramount is hardly alone in feeling the financial pain. Disney also cut staff in August with layoffs falling on ABC News, as well as its entertainment TV division, with National Geographic and Freeform particularly hard hit. This year’s continuing rounds of layoffs at Disney comes on the heels of the 7,000 jobs the House of Mouse cut last year.
One of the big reasons so many of these studios in Hollywood are seeing crappy numbers in their bottom line is that they have decided to create shows and movies that are sermons instead of stories, pushing an obvious left-wing agenda on their viewers. People want to be able to turn television and film as a means of escaping the real world. Entertainment should be engaging, but restful. A way to recharge the battery from the assault of the world’s problems.
With everything becoming political, this is getting harder and harder to accomplish. Thus, people are opting not to tune in or go to the movies. Studios have only themselves to blame. But they refuse to learn their lesson, instead following the Democratic Party’s orders to be propagandists instead of storytellers.