Nobody at Paramount needs to wear a Halloween costume into the office this week for things to be scary.
The studio has had a storm of recent headlines as new owner David Ellison and his top executives made dramatic moves and endured setbacks. The choppy waters follow an initial hero’s welcome for Ellison as he made a succession of mega-deals after the Paramount-Skydance merger closed in August — from paying $7.7 billion for the streaming rights to the UFC to shelling out $1.5 billion to re-up South Park and many millions to poach Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers from Netflix. In Hollywood, everybody loves you when you’re spending money.
The departure of Paramount+’s top hitmaker Taylor Sheridan to NBCUniversal was easily the most stunning news, provoking plenty of debate over whether Ellison massively fumbled or if he’s just being financially savvy (and saving himself a headache by reducing future clashes with the headstrong showrunner).
Paramount interestingly never made an offer to keep Sheridan (one imagines NBCU’s roughly $1 billion offer made Ellison simply go, “Nah, we’re good”). But given Ellison is on record as calling Sheridan — in what’s now surely his favorite quote — “a singular genius with a perfect track record,” it’s tough to argue that he’s playing four-dimensional chess and wanted to lose the man who made Paramount+’s biggest hits.
Then there are Ellison’s rebuffed offers to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a prospective deal that only Ellison and WBD chief David Zaslav seem excited about. WBD’s board has rejected Ellison’s bids that have reportedly ranged from $19 to last week’s $23.50 per share offer (as of Friday, the stock is currently valued at $22.42).
Ellison is reportedly not giving up on his quest to control two of the biggest legacy studios. The reports come along with a depressing political thumb-on-the-scale assumption that the Trump Administration’s Federal Communications Commission would be more likely to give the nod to Ellison acquiring the company over, say, Comcast. Given the FCC tried to yank Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air over a clumsily worded and insensitive joke, the idea that a government agency would favor a mogul who is perceived as being MAGA-friendly barely raises an eyebrow in the current environment.
Layoffs tend to follow any merger, and the ones that got underway this week are said to be in the works for months. But the sheer scope and scale of the downsizing at Paramount are a sad state of affairs. Reductions began Wednesday with 1,000 staffers — representing between 5 and 10 percent of the company — being let go. Another 1,000 layoffs are expected. Such moves are routinely cheered on Wall Street and some cuts are doubtless necessary given Paramount’s balance sheet ahead of the company’s third-quarter earnings report to investors next month. But it’s still a lot of bodies hitting the floor.
Then there are the high-profile talent departures at CBS News. Ellison has generated plenty of controversy tapping The Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News. The fretting by some that CBS News will become a Fox News clone seem overblown given that Weiss’ politics are vaguely centrist (depending on whom you ask). Still, it’s not a great look when eight on-air correspondents and hosts have apparently been pushed out and all of them are women — and half are women of color. One male on-air talent, CBS News anchor John Dickerson, is also leaving, but his departure has been framed by Dickerson and CBS News sources as his own decision — and a huge loss for the news division, so it’s not like Dickerson leaving makes it all somehow better.
News of yet another departure — that Gayle King would leave CBS Mornings — was reported and then denied by CBS and King, (“What I’m hearing in the building is not what I’m reading in the press,” she said). Messy.
With Ellison expected to discuss his vision for Paramount during the company’s third quarter earnings call on Nov. 10, one suspects that some degree of the mayhem is a strategy of getting the studio ship-shape before that key date. The term “clearing the decks” comes from the naval practice of removing loose obstructions from a ship’s deck before going into battle. Paramount is definitely clearing its deck, along with plenty of sailors jumping — and being pushed — over the side.
