{"id":346762,"date":"2025-11-01T00:31:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T00:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/346762\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T00:31:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T00:31:12","slug":"paramounts-no-good-very-bad-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/346762\/","title":{"rendered":"Paramount’s No Good Very Bad Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNobody at Paramount<\/a> needs to wear a Halloween costume into the office this week for things to be scary. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe studio has had a storm of recent headlines as new owner David Ellison<\/a> and his top executives made dramatic moves and endured setbacks. The choppy waters follow an initial hero\u2019s welcome for Ellison as he made a succession of mega-deals after the Paramount-Skydance merger closed in August \u2014 from paying $7.7 billion for the streaming rights to the UFC to shelling out $1.5 billion to re-up South Park and many millions to poach Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers from Netflix. In Hollywood, everybody loves you when you\u2019re spending money.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe departure of Paramount+\u2019s top hitmaker Taylor Sheridan<\/a> to NBCUniversal was easily the most stunning news, provoking plenty of debate<\/a> over whether Ellison massively fumbled or if he\u2019s just being financially savvy (and saving himself a headache by reducing future clashes with the headstrong showrunner).<\/p>\n

\n\tParamount interestingly never made an offer to keep Sheridan<\/a> (one imagines NBCU\u2019s roughly $1 billion offer made Ellison simply go, \u201cNah, we\u2019re good\u201d). But given Ellison is on record as calling Sheridan \u2014 in what\u2019s now surely his favorite quote \u2014 \u201ca singular genius\u00a0with a perfect track record,\u201d it\u2019s tough to argue that he\u2019s playing four-dimensional chess and wanted to lose the man who made Paramount+\u2019s biggest hits.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen there are Ellison\u2019s rebuffed offers to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a prospective deal that only Ellison and WBD chief David Zaslav seem excited about. WBD\u2019s board has rejected Ellison\u2019s bids that have reportedly ranged from $19 to last week\u2019s $23.50 per share offer (as of Friday, the stock is currently valued at $22.42).<\/p>\n

\n\tEllison is reportedly not giving up on his quest to control two of the biggest legacy studios. The reports come along with a depressing political thumb-on-the-scale assumption that the Trump Administration\u2019s Federal Communications Commission would be more likely to give the nod to Ellison acquiring the company over, say, Comcast. Given the FCC tried to yank Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air over a clumsily worded and insensitive joke, the idea that a government agency would favor a mogul who is perceived as being MAGA-friendly barely raises an eyebrow in the current environment.<\/p>\n

\n\tLayoffs tend to follow any merger, and the ones that got underway this week are said to be in the works for months. But the sheer scope and scale of the downsizing at Paramount are a sad state of affairs. Reductions began Wednesday with 1,000 staffers<\/a> \u2014 representing between 5 and 10 percent of the company \u2014 being let go. Another 1,000 layoffs are expected. Such moves are routinely cheered on Wall Street and some cuts are doubtless necessary given Paramount\u2019s balance sheet ahead of the company\u2019s third-quarter earnings report to investors next month. But it\u2019s still a lot of bodies hitting the floor. <\/p>\n

\n\tThen there are the high-profile talent departures at CBS<\/a> News. Ellison has generated plenty of controversy tapping The Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News<\/a>. The fretting by some that CBS News will become a Fox News clone seem overblown given that Weiss\u2019 politics are vaguely centrist (depending on whom you ask). Still, it\u2019s not a great look when eight on-air correspondents and hosts have apparently been pushed out and all of them are women<\/a> \u2014 and half are women of color. One male on-air talent, CBS News anchor John Dickerson, is also leaving, but his departure has been framed by Dickerson and CBS News sources as his own decision \u2014 and a huge loss for the news division, so it\u2019s not like Dickerson leaving makes it all somehow better.<\/p>\n

\n\tNews of yet another departure \u2014 that Gayle King would leave CBS Mornings \u2014 was reported and then denied by CBS and King,<\/a> (\u201cWhat I\u2019m hearing in the building is not what I\u2019m reading in the press,\u201d she said). Messy.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Ellison expected to discuss his vision for Paramount during the company\u2019s third quarter earnings call on Nov. 10, one suspects that some degree of the mayhem is a strategy of getting the studio ship-shape before that key date. The term \u201cclearing the decks\u201d comes from the naval practice of removing loose obstructions from a ship\u2019s deck before going into battle. Paramount is definitely clearing its deck, along with plenty of sailors jumping \u2014 and being pushed \u2014 over the side. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nobody at Paramount needs to wear a Halloween costume into the office this week for things to be…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":346763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,15328,26871,32129,15329,12045,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-346762","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-cbs","10":"tag-cbs-news","11":"tag-david-ellison","12":"tag-paramount","13":"tag-taylor-sheridan","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}