Gen X Soared as Hollywood Boomed. The Collapse Is Brutal

Roxanne Pompa was a casualty of the Paramount merger. To be specific, the VP of international formats and production was a casualty of the first Paramount merger in the summer of 2024, when the company axed more than 2,000 staffers — a whopping 15 percent of its workforce — in anticipation of its marriage to David Ellison-owned Skydance. There’s been a whole other merger since then, not to mention hundreds more layoffs. Pompa had been at the company for 18 years. 

As so many savvy laid-off Hollywood workers do, she pivoted and started her own consulting firm, offering her services to Sony Pictures Television’s game show group and other media and production companies. But this work only brings in about half of what she earned as a VP at Paramount, which neared $275,000. 

“There’s no bonus, no perks. It’s like I am living in my own alt universe — my own upside-down world,” she tells me. 

Gen Xers like Pompa rode the cable and Peak TV boom of the 2010s into lucrative careers, convinced they’d secured their place in Hollywood. They bought homes, raised families and assumed they had another decade or two of work ahead of them.

But now, as mergers and layoffs eliminate the middle- and upper-management jobs they spent decades climbing toward, they’re confronting a particularly cruel reality: Their experience makes them expensive, and their age makes finding another job that much harder. Just 57 percent of displaced workers ages 55 to 64 had found new employment as of January 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with 73 percent of those ages 25 to 54. Nearly two-thirds of workers above 50 have either witnessed or experienced age discrimination firsthand, according to an AARP study. 

“I was definitely not prepared for retirement. I was 58 at the time [I was laid off] and thought that I would be working through my 60s,” laments Pompa, who is still paying off her daughter’s student loans. 

Indeed, a vicious cycle of mergers, layoffs and shrinking production has been squeezing the middle — and middle-aged. California has lost more than 52,000 film and television jobs since 2022, nearly all of them in Los Angeles County, according to an August county government report.

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For Hollywood’s Gen Xers (ages 46-61), it’s especially cruel. They are often at their most expensive stage of life — supporting children, aging parents and mortgages — precisely when the industry is eliminating the senior-level jobs that once made those obligations manageable, and even the C-suite is on the street. And unlike workers in their 20s and 30s, they have less time to recover financially from a career-ending setback.

In Pompa’s case, she says there are three valuable lessons she has learned from this: Ageism is real. Everyone is expendable. And once you’re out, you’re out. 

Today in Series Business, Gen X workers get real about: 

• How Hollywood’s boom generation went from six-figure careers to wondering how they’ll survive
• The desperate squeeze to hold on to income, health care and retirement benefits, one gig at a time
• Why Hollywood workers don’t get retirement parties — they “just stop getting called back”
• The painful choices facing Gen Xers who can no longer afford to wait for Hollywood to call