With Warner Bros. Discovery up for sale again and the industry bracing for yet another wave of consolidation — and the inevitable job cuts that come with it — one of the big questions is how its labor force, which spoke out against Warner’s merger with Discovery three years ago, will respond.
So far, several labor insiders tell TheWrap that most of the unions are going with a “wait-and-see” approach, monitoring how the sale process unfolds and whether Paramount Skydance, fresh off its own completed merger this summer, ends up with WBD. Other potential buyers are reportedly looking at WBD’s assets as well.
Only the Writers Guild of America has weighed in on the matter, saying any deal would be a “disaster for writers, for consumers and for competition.” Two sources said that as of Wednesday, none of the member unions at the Entertainment Union Coalition, which includes WGA, SAG-AFTRA, the California IATSE Council and others, have brought up the Warner sale yet in meetings.
The silence is a stark contrast from the more vocal opposition the unions expressed ahead of the Warner Bros. Discovery deal, which came at a time when the Biden Administration took a stronger stance on antitrust. By contrast, a senior official in the Trump Administration told the New York Post that the president favors Paramount as Warner’s next owner, signaling that any union pushback, if and when it comes, will have to go against the White House.
Such a merger would have major consequences, with potentially thousands of additional jobs getting slashed, fewer productions and less bargaining power for the unions.
“Writers don’t have a marketplace anymore, and even if California’s got more tax credits to give out, we could soon have one less studio applying for them,” said an actor who asked to remain anonymous. “All this organizing around bringing filming back to LA is going to get cut off at the legs if Warner is gone.”
The Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA declined to comment for this story.
Jobs and union power at risk
The potential for job cuts are devastating and come on top of years of merger-related reductions. Since the 2022 merger, WBD has cut more than 1,100 jobs, including 10% of its motion picture group workforce amidst its slew of box office hits this past summer. And over at Paramount Skydance, at least 2,000 jobs are expected to be cut, starting as early as this week.
While WBD has put up a “for sale” sign, and companies such as Comcast and Netflix have reportedly signaled interest, Paramount appears to be in the pole position.
Assuming those cuts go through, Paramount would be left with about 16,600 global employees, a calculation based off of its 2024 headcount disclosure. WBD ended last year with 53,600. With a combined work force of 70,200, any merger would lead to several thousand more job cuts.
Then there are the productions. In the two-plus years following the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, the struggle for Hollywood’s union workers to find production jobs has taken center stage. Runaway production and steep cutbacks in greenlights have been major factors, but losing the studio behind films like “Sinners” and TV shows like “The Pitt” will only further weaken the power of the industry’s unions.
“Merger after merger in the media industry has harmed workers, diminished competition and free speech, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars better invested in organic growth,” the joint statement from WGA West and WGA East read.
As the past five years of a Disney-owned 20th Century Studios have shown, two studios do not put out the same number of movies when they are merged as they do apart. The highest number of movies Disney has released under the 20th Century label in a single year is five. In 2025 that was: “The Amateur,” “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” “Predator: Badlands,” “Ella McKay” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”
In 2017, 20th Century Fox released 16 films. Even taking into account that some of 20th Century’s output like the acclaimed 2023 horror film “No One Will Save You” were streaming exclusives, the merger has meant fewer Hollywood productions greenlit and fewer jobs for creatives and crew workers.
Movie theaters, which are fighting to make the most from a box office that still hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic, are counting on studios like Paramount to make good on their public pledge to increase the number of films they put on the big screen each year.
A history of ignored warnings
During the Biden Administration, when a Federal Trade Commission led by Lina Khan aggressively pursued antitrust litigation and successfully blocked the merger of publishing giants Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, the Writers Guild of America West released several memos from its research team decrying the impact of mergers on Hollywood.
In 2021, WGA West released “Broken Promises,” a nine-page memo outlining the anticompetitive practices that followed media mergers from Comcast-NBCUniversal to AT&T-Time Warner. Two years later, following the Warner Bros Discovery merger, it released a follow-up, noting how the company had “cancelled, pulled, or written off $2 billion in content and laid off hundreds of workers” in the months following the merger’s completion.
“The series of mergers that led us here — first the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger and then the $43 billion WarnerMedia Discovery merger — have each
promised to create a better competitor, but have instead left the merged entity debt-burdened and focused on cutting costs to rationalize these disastrous
business decisions,” reads the “Broken Promises” follow-up.
Yet in spite of these warnings, the deals all went through, with now another potential one to come.
Finally taking action
While WGA West’s statement to TheWrap this week is the first from any of the unions in response to Warner going back on the M&A market, it might not be the last. Another union that has made speaking out against mergers part of its recent public messaging is Hollywood Teamsters, which most recently spoke out against the proposed merger between TV companies Nexstar and Tegna amidst ABC’s five-day pause of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last month.
While all of Hollywood Labor released statements condemning the pause as an attack on free speech, Teamsters noted in its statement that Nexstar was seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna.
“We are witnessing a dangerous trend of corporations trying to fast-track mergers through the back door,” the Teamsters said in its statement in support of Kimmel. “This reckless and greed-fueled consolidation of corporate power is a direct threat to good union jobs and the livelihoods of our members. Do not let the politics of the moment distract you — corporations are selling out working families and our American freedoms to amass even greater wealth.”
This reckless and greed-fueled consolidation of corporate power is a direct threat to good union jobs and the livelihoods of our members. -Teamster statement
While Hollywood Teamsters has not spoken yet on Warner’s sale specifically, secretary-treasurer Lindsay Dougherty told TheWrap that speaking out against media mergers wherever they come up will continue to be a major part of the union’s messaging going forward.
“We need to educate our members and the public of what’s happening to our industry. Along with runaway production and artificial intelligence, this consolidation that we’re seeing and that we have seen in the last several decades impacts the amount of work and the content that’s being produced,” Dougherty said. “Whatever leverage we have as unions, we must utilize it.”
