Key Highlights :

Paramount Skydance planning 2,000–3,000 job cuts by November 2025

Pre-merger workforce: 18,600 staff and 3,500 project staff

Job cuts coinciding with third-quarter earnings report

Strategic refashioning comprises $7.7B UFC broadcast rights pact

No public company announcement yet

Key Background :

The entertainment sector saw a shocking change in August 2025 when Paramount Global closed its $8.4 billion merger deal with Skydance Media to create the reconstituted Paramount Skydance Corp. The deal was sold as a strategic union of Paramount's deep heritage in television and film and Skydance's entrepreneurial and tech-firm methodology for content.

But major mergers typically go hand in hand with employee consolidations. Already, analysts had predicted that consolidation would bring deep reductions in numbers as the merged company would attempt to cut out duplication and maximize its efficiencies. The 2,000 to 3,000 anticipated firings are in line with those predictions and account for the level of restructuring in progress.

By December 2024, nearly 18,600 full- and part-time staff and another 3,500 workers on project were employed in Paramount. The proposed retrenchment thus amounts to a significant diminution of human assets, i.e., different divisions such as administrative, production, and corporate units are bound to be impacted.

Timing the job reductions to coincide with third-quarter earnings reveals seems a conscious move. The management will hopefully reveal to the public a leaner, more cost-effective entity, proof that integration is as much the joining of fiscal restraint as it is the union of opportunities for future growth. That is how other media titans have handled post-merger restructuring in the past few years.

Apart from cost-cutting, Paramount Skydance is also making bold ambition. Its seven-year, $7.7 billion purchase of the UFC's broadcast rights is one of its initial badge-wearing investments post-merger. The deal for exclusive U.S. rights and solidifies Paramount's position in live sports entertainment a unit growing more valuable for its capacity to win subscribers and advertisers alike.

This double strategy laid off staff to cut costs and invested big in high-end sports and entertainment programming witnesses the balancing act that needs to be undertaken by Paramount Skydance. The company needs to struggle through the twin challenge of making investors happy with productivity as well as fighting in a more fluid environment where streaming behemoths and tech-blessed rivals continue to push the limits.

About the Author

Ryan Parker

Ryan Parker is a Managing Editor at Business Minds Media.