Sturm Und Drang At Warner Bros Amid Paramount Merger Has Insiders Wondering If The Brand Survives

A Zoom call today with 500 senior Warner Bros. staffers about the Paramount-AGs settlement did little to dissipate the Mordor-like gloomy clouds over the Burbank, CA lot, to use a Lord of the Rings reference.

Today’s Zoom, which has been routine since Paramount won the bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, was led by WBD Studios Chief Operating Officer Simon Robinson, who is running point on the merger integration, as well as Chief Legal Officer Priya Aiyar, WBD Chief Comms Robert Gibbs and HR Boss Amy Girdwood. The four conceded that they didn’t have that much visibility into Paramount’s plans for the new company but indicated that the anticipation is for the deal to close in about 10 days, in line with Paramount CEO David Ellison‘s two-week timeframe provided on Monday.

The name and the leadership structure of the new company would likely be announced ahead of close, the executives reportedly said, though they weren’t clear as to when exactly that would be. We heard that Girldwood told leaders to take a moment to reflect on the great work accomplished during their tenures.

“It feels like a scramble,” one source said.

To say staffers were surprised by the attorneys general settlement Monday doesn’t really cover it.

“It was a big shock,” one person said. “If you were riding the rollercoaster, you felt like things were not progressing.”

Still, even if the settlement and its timing came as a surprise, the ultimate result seemed inevitable as WBD CEO David Zaslav has been hellbent on selling the studio. David Ellison’s takeover of the Albert, Harry, Sam and Jack Warner founded cinematic institution “was always bound to happen,” one insider exclaimed.

Zaslav, who is likely to walk away with more than $600M from the $110B merger, was not on today’s Zoom, we’re told.

The Ellison-run Paramount has said that the Warner Bros. acquisition will yield $6B in synergy savings, and that doesn’t necessarily translate into job cuts, rather inefficiencies in other structural areas (i.e. real estate portfolio, data servers).

But Warner Bros staffers aren’t buying that.

“We’ve been here before. We know what it looks like,” said one insider about the changeover in ownership of Warner Bros. over the last decade. It was only four years ago that AT&T dumped Warner Media into the hands of Discovery.

Myriad people inside Warner Bros. are cynical about the capping of severances and the fact that only a few at the top are bound for a windfall. There’s also ire over the pausing of contract renewals due to the merger, as well as irritable infighting between departments about theatrical failures this year; No one title has cleared $100M at the domestic box office — the highest-grossing movie stateside is Wuthering Heights at $84M. Home entertainment and data analytics divisions were none too happy about DC’s Supergirl tanking. With its $186M net production cost and a global gross of $126.3M, key staffers believe that DC chose the wrong comic-book character to adapt.

On the immediate horizon as the Paramount-Warner Bros. marriage comes together is the $125M Tom Cruise starring, Alejandro Iñárritu directed, Legendary-produced Digger, opening on Oct. 2. While domestic debut prospects are around $20M, Warners is hoping to get past any sour headlines about box office-to-cost ratios on the film, much like they did on One Battle After Another, as the 4x Oscar winning filmmaker’s latest Doctor Strangelove-like epic is being primed as an awards season contender; a chip that Paramount really doesn’t have on its year-end schedule.

The new Paramount could also inherit another awards contender and its first billion dollar grossing title since Skydance took over the Melrose Ave lot in Legendary/Warner Bros’ Dune: Part Three. That opens on Dec. 18.

At Paramount, the epic would fall into the arms of global marketing and distribution guru — and former WB senior ranking theatrical suit — Josh Goldstine, who led the Dune franchise across two movies to a $1.12B global gross and eight Oscar wins.

We’ve heard on the Paramount side, that it’s still TBD in regards to how the merger will handle duplications in marketing and distribution.

“There could be more fear on the Paramount side,” says one source in the know when it comes to marketing. How’s that? Goldstine will be back together with the team he built at Warners, meaning Dana Nussbaum and Christian Davin in global marketing and Creative Advertising EVP John Stanford.

There’s also a thick fog around those staffers who were bound to decamp from Warner Bros. proper in the previously planned Gunnar Wiedenfels led spinoff Global Networks.

Yes, Warner Bros. staffers are already putting themselves out there for other jobs. Some of them have already found new gigs — read: Former EVP of Comms Katie Martin Kelly. Prized by De Luca and Abdy, Martin Kelly high-tailed it for Netflix as VP of Comms as her contract ended, rather than wait for the Russian roulette the new conglomerate could bring. Former HBO Max EVP Originals Marketing Pia Barlow found a new job at Amazon MGM Studios as their Series Marketing VP, a gig that triggered WBD to sue the shooting site/streamer for poaching.

The deal closing would likely trigger more voluntary departures as many WBD executives had been waiting to cash out stock options post-transaction and had been bound by contracts that typically provide a way out in case of change of ownership.

“Since David Zaslav took control of Warner Bros, there’s just been thousands of jobs lost,” one former Turner publicist emphatically told us. “Those are jobs that the entertainment industry is never going to get back.”

And therein lies the ultimate piercing wound for any Warners or Paramount employee in the danger zone: The fact that there are not a lot of jobs out there is a big deal.

What’s more, adds a source, “People are very concerned about the survival of the Warner Bros. brand.”

Counters a senior ranking insider at the conglomerate to us: “There’s a feeling of relief from senior executives to junior staff about the possibilities that the new company can bring. They were very excited by David Ellison’s note.”

For now, Paramount is inheriting at least 39 Warner Bros. theatrical releases on the calendar dated between Oct. 2 this year and the end of 2028. That output reps 56% of what will be a current combined 70 features between the two studios. During the agita of Netflix and Paramount courting Warner Bros., the studio’s greenlighting of productions has been at a loud hum. Assumptions were made by some that Warner Bros. Motion Pictures would be in purgatory during the merger talk time, that filmmakers and reps would be wary of taking projects to them. That’s not really an option for content creators at a time when it’s a miracle for any major motion picture to get off the ground.

Something to look forward to: While a Barbie sequel hasn’t been greenlit yet due to constant talks with top tier talent such as director Greta Gerwig and stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, expect that to be one of the first orders of business in the new David Ellison-owned Paramount-Warner Bros.

Beams one optimistic Warner exec, “The new merger gives us the all the financial resources to compete on a level with the big streamers.”