Hollywood’s $100bn merger meets a shrinking workforce

By Tom Whitfield

Netflix cut around 1,000 employees, roughly 6% of its workforce, before chief content officer Bela Bajaria departed on Thursday, October 16 and film head Dan Lin was fired the following Monday, EL PAÍS reports.

An email to employees in some Disney divisions cancelled the annual Halloween celebration, which had not been cancelled in years. Rumors spread, and many employees began to expect another layoff round within weeks or days. EL PAÍS gives no reason for the cancellation and does not link it to a formal review.

EL PAÍS records the following Disney reductions:

• At the start of 2023, Disney cut 7,000 employees.
• In mid-2025, the company carried out another major round, although the report gives no total.
• This spring, Disney cut around 1,000 more jobs.
• In October, Disney eliminated another 300 positions.

Nor were these the first cuts across the entertainment industry. The report says California’s industry expects further layoffs and cost-cutting even as the box office enjoys one of its strongest periods. It also identifies soaring production costs as a reason for the uncertainty, but provides no production-cost total or forecast.

What does the $100bn merger change for Hollywood workers?

Paramount’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery will operate under the Skydance name, EL PAÍS reports. The deal is worth nearly $100 billion. For now, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery remain separate companies, each with its own corporate structure.

Industry insiders expect real integration to begin within about six months. Services, office spaces and departments would then merge gradually, reducing the likelihood that the combined business maintains two sales teams, two marketing departments and two communications divisions. Many workers expect job cuts to begin by early 2027.

For workers, the practical change is likely to be organizational consolidation rather than an immediate, confirmed list of redundancies. The report cites expectations, not a company timetable, and supplies no estimate of how many jobs the merger could remove.

EL PAÍS also presents Los Angeles’s retreat from the center of audiovisual production as both a cause and a consequence of the industry’s instability. The pandemic severely damaged the city’s position. The writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 secured improvements in collective bargaining agreements and working conditions, but the resulting higher labor costs have made some companies move productions out of the city and California.

Industry professionals launched the Stay In LA platform a couple of years ago. Hundreds of workers have used civic initiatives and legal efforts to urge studios to keep productions in the city. Their campaign seeks to make Los Angeles “the easiest (and most competitive) place in the world to shoot.” EL PAÍS reports no evidence that the campaign has reversed the production shift.

An Ernst & Young study of film and television production between 1999 and 2024 found:

• The U.S. share of film production budgets fell from 74% to 42%, while the overseas share rose from 26% to 58%.
• Productions moving overseas would have generated an additional $2 billion in domestic spending had they remained in the country, with knock-on effects on direct and indirect employment and the wider economy.
• The U.S. share of television episodes filmed fell from 94% to 64%, which the study described as a 30% drop.

Los Angeles is also losing residents. U.S. Census data cited by local media show that more than 54,000 people left Los Angeles County between July 2024 and July 2025. The county’s population fell from more than 10 million in 2020 to 9.7 million in 2025, EL PAÍS reports.

Zillow puts the average Los Angeles home value at $928,000. Local media report that buying a home costs 108% more than renting, citing a study by a construction company. The report does not name that company or describe its methodology, so the comparison needs scrutiny.

The population, housing and employment figures point to difficult conditions for workers. EL PAÍS does not establish a direct causal link between each factor and job insecurity, however, and its account leaves the relative importance of taxes, labor costs, production incentives and corporate consolidation untested.

EL PAÍS’s strongest counterpoint is the 2026 box office, which it describes as the strongest U.S. year in years. Summer ticket sales reached $5 billion, driven above all by The Odyssey and Spider-Man. The animated hits Toy Story 5, Super Mario Galaxy and Minions & Monsters grossed nearly $1.1 billion together in the United States.

Other leading successes include the Michael Jackson biopic, Project Hail Mary, the surprise hits Obsession and Backrooms, and the long-awaited sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. Worldwide, five films have surpassed $1 billion, the first time that has happened since 2019.

Those figures do not reconcile the industry’s employment and production problems. The report offers no account of how much ticket income remains for production or workers, and it does not quantify the production costs behind the current layoffs. For workers, the next six months will test whether the Skydance merger moves from expectation to actual consolidation; the box-office boom alone offers no assurance of job security.