Last month, Hollywood braved the summers of hits. This time, a violent mirror image has appeared: a terrible time of cuts.
The entertainment industry is reeling from reduces at Paramount Global, which next year began a heavy cost-cutting work that is expected to eradicate 2, 000 work, or 15 % of personnel, by year’s end back of a long-in-the-works ownership change.
As part of that effort, the struggling media giant closed down Paramount Television Studios, the unit responsible for streaming shows such as” Reacher” and” The Offer”. Up to 30 employees at the Nicole Clemens-led department lost their jobs as a result of the shift in the group’s programming to CBS Studios, according to George Cheeks.
The labor decline is yet another illustration of the extensive reset the film and television industry has been through in the wake of the streaming war. Debt-saddled Warner Bros. Discovery just targeted roughly 1, 000 breaks in its latest round of reduction. Walt Disney Co.’s TV section next quarter shed 140 employees, the latest in a square of cuts at the Burbank business.
After losing billions of dollars trying to catch up with Netflix, studios used the writers ‘ and actors ‘ strikes as a cover to cut back on their spending. All the while, the cord TV company continued to dissolve, like a gradually melting ice that suddenly broke into pieces.
Paramount’s and Warner Bros. Discovery’s choice to downplay the value of their cord network sounded like an entrance that the TV industry had run out of steam and that once illustrious names like TNT, HGTV, MTV, and Comedy Central had lost importance.
Between Warner Bros. and Paramount. Discovery,$ 15 billion in value were wiped out in a matter of weeks. In another big alter, Warner Bros. Broadcast theater key Channing Dungey will now be in charge of overseeing Discovery’s networks, it announced on Friday.
The results of what Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger predicted in 2015, when he sent the shares of internet firms, including Disney, plunging with feedback about the issues that cable channels like ESPN would face, all seemed reasonable. More ominously, between his first and second terms as Disney’s CEO, he remarked that traditional TV was “marching to a distinct precipice”, and would be “pushed off”.
Those predictions are coming true in dramatic fashion, especially for Iger’s rivals. In the first half of the following year, David Ellison’s company, Skydance Media, and RedBird Capital are gearing up to take over Paramount. Meanwhile, speculation abounds over when activist investors might set their sights on Warner and its chief executive, David Zaslav.
For the workers in the entertainment industry who’ve been struggling to find jobs since the “hot labor summer” and fall concluded, there’s been little relief so far. Only recently have glimmers of hope begun to emerge, and optimism has been undermined by the perception that the industry is smaller than it was a few years ago when businesses were unable to produce enough content.
The long-awaited recovery has been painfully slow, but the green light committees at the studios have started to emerge from their hideous tunnels, as my colleagues Wendy Lee, Stephen Battaglio, and Thomas Suh Lauder wrote last week while compiling data from London-based market research firm Ampere Analysis.
According to The Times ‘ analysis of the figures, major entertainment companies ‘ commissions for traditional broadcast television, cable, and streaming programs increased by 39 % to 1, 013 programs in the first half of 2024, compared to the second half of 2023. The information included Warner Bros. green lights. Discovery, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, Paramount and Comcast ( not including theatrical movies ).
However, according to Ampere data, green light activity was still down 9.9 % compared to the first half of 2023. Even more dire are comparisons with the first half of “peak TV” year 2022, when the companies commissioned 1, 515 programs in the U. S. and Canada. In a more global perspective, the data also reveal that a large portion of the newly commissioned shows and streaming movies are being produced abroad and for less money.
Different factors contribute to the sluggishness, with some observers resigning to a more or less permanent market correction than the boom years of two or three years ago. Others claim studios halted production in the first half of the year or moved production abroad because they feared yet another work stoppage, this time caused by IATSE or the Teamsters.
When will the U.S. production of entertainment actually begin to recover? The feared crew member strikes, which were never likely, did n’t come to pass, so perhaps things will now start to pick up again.
There’s a reason” Survive till’ 25″ has for months been the mantra of below-the-line workers, writers, actors and others looking to get on with the business of making shows and movies. Fans of troubled sports teams and those anticipating a$ 11 billion annual box office will say,” We’ll get’em next year.”
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