Julius Young — Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Vantage
The merger debate lives in boardrooms and courtrooms. The people it will actually affect are the grip truck drivers, the costume supervisors, and the below-the-line workers nobody mentions in a regulatory filing.
Between 2022 and 2025, entertainment jobs in Los Angeles fell by 25 percent, according to an Otis College of Art and Design report. Soundstage occupancy fell to 62 percent in the first half of 2025, down from near-full utilization in 2016. The 2026 WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and DGA union negotiations were the quietest in recent memory — not labor peace, but labor exhaustion. Workers who staged historic strikes in 2023 accepted four-year contracts without public sniping because you do not have an appetite for striking when you are not sure you have a job to go back to. Paramount has pledged to produce at least 30 feature films annually post-acquisition. But thirty films can be produced with significantly fewer people than two studios' combined workforces. The $6 billion in promised synergies has to come from somewhere. The working people of Hollywood are waiting for someone to say where.