Paramount/Skydance Makes Cuts; Home Entertainment Department Majorly Affected

[Britnasty]

Did you grab IF 4K last week? Better run out and grab it before it and other Paramount titles become scarce.

All right, Bits readers, today is a tough one news-wise, and it has little to do with specific title release news or announcements.

We’ve learned from multiple sources now that the 15% US workforce cuts at Paramount Global—a restructuring that’s happening in advance of the company’s merger with Skydance Media to reduce annual costs by some $500 million—have landed very heavily on the Melrose lot. As reported widely last week, the layoffs amount to about 2,000 people, with most expected to be gone by the end of next month and the rest by year’s end.

Current co-CEOs George Cheeks, Brian Robbins, and Chris McCarthy have described the layoffs thusly in a memo to the workforce: “As we continue to advance our plan, we announced on our earnings call last week that we will be reducing our US-based workforce by approximately 15%, focusing on redundant functions and streamlining corporate teams.”

The expectation was that every division would be impacted. As reported last week, Paramount Television Studios has been shuttered completely. What’s not been reported widely yet is the impact on overall studio operations.

The Digital Bits sources indicate that nearly every department has been affected—in a few cases severely—from marketing, legal, and accounting, to production, post-production, finance, mastering, vault and library services, and unfortunately also Paramount Home Entertainment. The cuts are reportedly not so deep as to result in a complete loss of institutional knowledge, but they’re more than deep enough to result in major workflow disruptions.

Word first began to reach The Bits early last week that indie home entertainment distributors working regularly with Paramount—among them Imprint, Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Vinegar Syndrome, and Shout! Studios—were suddenly facing a complete freeze on new licensing activity.

Within hours of receiving that news, we began sending out inquiries to sources within the industry and the implications quickly became clear. Studio people themselves simply didn’t respond—for understandable and obvious reasons—but alarm was rapidly spreading virtually everywhere else.

The disruption in home entertainment at Paramount is reportedly so severe that once titles already announced or in the production pipeline arrive in stores, there may be a months-long draught in Paramount Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD disc product, not just from the studio itself but also in terms of deep catalog Paramount titles from all their indie-label licensees. And getting disc production at the studio back up to speed going forward is probably going to require a heavy reliance on outside vendors.

Either way, the situation at the studio isn’t good—very much akin to the disruptions we’ve seen from other major studios that have gone through merger, acquisition, or reorg turmoil, including the Fox sale to Disney, Warner’s seemingly never-ending Zaslav personnel sloughs, and the belt-tightening that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hopefully, the situation at Paramount will stabilize sooner than later, and new Skydance management will see the value of—and continue to support—physical disc media and home entertainment catalog product as aggressively as the previous studio regime has done. But the situation remains fluid, and the simple fact is we just don’t know what the new owners will see as a priority.

Rest assured, we’re continuing to monitor developments and we will share updates here at The Bits as they come in.

https://thedigitalbits.com/columns/m...ts/081924-1245