Paramount Global Co-CEO Chris McCarthy confirmed the long-expected layoffs hitting the company, saying the media company plans to cut its U.S.-based workforce by about 15%.
Speaking on the company’s second-quarter earnings call, the exec said marketing and communications would be one of two areas to be targeted in the reductions. The other will be support functions including legal, finance and other areas of the company’s administrative operations. Deadline reported earlier Thursday that significant cuts were in the works.
The layoffs will take place in the coming weeks, McCarthy said, and will be largely completed by the end of 2024.
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“As you can imagine, these are difficult decisions to make,” McCarthy said. “We have incredibly talented people at Paramount, and these actions are not reflections of their contributions. Rather, they are necessary to transform our organization for the future.”
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Prior to McCarthy’s comments, Paramount released a second-quarter earnings report with some upbeat aspects but also a glaring statistic: $5.98 billion. That’s the amount of the write-down the company took on its cable networks during the quarter, ahead of the pending merger deal with Skydance. The point of the move was to re-size the value of the linear TV holdings at the company, something Warner Bros. Discovery had just done a day earlier, writing down $9.1 billion.
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The cuts had first been signaled officially in June, when McCarthy and the two other execs in Paramount’s Office of the CEO, George Cheeks and Brian Robbins, announced they had identified $500 million in annualized cost savings. Several weeks later, when Skydance made its proposal to merge with Paramount, it said it saw $2 billion in cost savings in the combination.
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Barring any late-arriving offers during a “go-shop” period included in the Skydance agreement (which ends a minute before midnight on August 21), the David Ellison-run company will enter a regulatory review process. The parties have said the close of the transaction is targeted for the first half of 2025.