How Many Layoffs Does Hollywood Need to Save Itself?

There was a time when CEOs of struggling companies understood the symbolism of shared sacrifice. Lee Iacocca famously took a $1 annual salary as Chrysler faced bankruptcy. Steve Jobs did the same when he returned to rescue Apple. During the 2008 financial crisis, Detroit’s auto executives again were offering to work for a buck a year.

Sure, some were collecting plenty of compensation elsewhere, deferred stock blah blah blah. But at least they understood the optics.

So when did we stop expecting even the symbolism from our leaders?

Certainly not in Hollywood, where the executives engineering the industry’s endless rounds of mergers to debt to layoffs have hardly been taking vows of poverty. The fortunes being amassed at the top are staggering, even as thousands beneath them — people who built the value of the companies they so coveted — face the unemployment line.

We’ve seen this movie before. Private-equity owners loaded Toys “R” Us with billions in debt before the iconic chain collapsed. At Payless ShoeSource, investors collected hundreds of millions in debt-financed dividends before the company went bankrupt — twice. The list goes on and on and on, through groceries, healthcare and even veterinary medicine.

Increasingly, Hollywood is operating under a similar ethos: acquire, consolidate, slash costs, extract value, repeat. I’ll use a strip-mining analogy here: The studios and their libraries are mines of beloved intellectual property, built over decades by generations of writers, filmmakers, craftspeople and executives. But instead of replenishing those mines, the industry’s new masters seem determined to extract every last ounce of value, take the spoils for themselves and then leave the landscape barren for everyone else.

Consider Warner Bros., whose employees have already endured the AT&T and Discovery eras, only to face another round of cuts under Skydance. Every new merger promises to save Hollywood. Every new merger leaves behind more debt, more layoffs and another group of richly rewarded dealmakers.

At what point do we stop calling this saving Hollywood and start asking who’s actually getting rich from its dismantling?

Let’s take a look at some recent headlines: