The Employees Praying Inside Paramount

Anxiety as potential new owners, layoffs, headlines cloud every move inside the legacy studios: 'I think about job security every day'

(Moor Studio)

Back in February, Bob Bakish, then CEO of Paramount Global, sent a company-wide memo announcing a round of layoffs. The timing was curious, coming two days after what Bakish noted — in the cost-cutting missive — was “a blockbuster event with Super Bowl LVIII that showcased the full power of Paramount.” His remarks about budget cuts being a “difficult process” felt obligatory at best. 

The Paramount workforce, still trying to claw its way back from the months-long dual strikes and feeling unmoored as sales talks swirled, couldn’t believe the tone-deafness. “There was some resentment about who the layoffs were primarily affecting,” says one executive, who works in a non-creative role at Paramount Pictures. The film studio wasn’t hard hit, but it still wasn’t easy hearing about veteran executives and lower-level staff across the company who were part of the 800 cuts. There was also incredulity that there was no mention of Bakish reducing his own $30 million-plus annual pay package amid the cutbacks (yeeeeaah, right!), the fourth time Paramount shed workers in 14 months. “All the decision makers that put us in this position, it was like, off with their heads.” 

So, when Bakish himself got the ax a couple months later — complete with a $258,000 monthly “consulting salary” and estimated $48.5 million golden parachute — the executive recalls thinking, “Finally.” 

Still, the five weeks since the change at top have done little to quell unease on the lot, where the company is playing the final quarter of Hollywood’s new reality competition, Survivor: Legacy Studio, ahead of everyone else.

Laden with debt ($14.6 billion as of April) that’s been rated as junk, and suffering net losses of $565 million during the first quarter of the year, Paramount, long smaller than its peers and with a different shareholder structure, is facing a crossroads that the other traditional players have so far outmaneuvered. (For those keeping track, Disney, far more diversified, has debt of $39.5 billion but is both profitable and has better free cash flow; WBD’s is $39.1 billion).

While Paramount’s top brass instruct everyone to focus on the work — “There will always be noise and speculation around every media company, but we can only control what is in front of us now,” studio chief (and new Paramount co-CEO) Brian Robbins told employees in April — the workday has become a constant interruption of push alerts and email blasts about the company’s ongoing sales process. Any of them could meaningfully impact the fate of thousands and their livelihood. Meanwhile, communication from the inside remains eerily quiet. On June 4, Paramount canceled an employee town hall at the last minute that would have been led by Robbins and fellow Office of the CEO mates George Cheeks and Chris McCarthy the next day, ostensibly to discuss the future of the company.

“I still read [the news],” says this executive, but “no one really knows what’s going on.”

But Paramount employees, it turns out, are not alone in quietly panicking every day.