Paramount-WBD Deal Architect Gerry Cardinale Says Most Of $6B In Expected Cost Savings Will Not Be Layoffs

Gerry Cardinale, Paramount board member and principal architect of the company’s imminent merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, insists that most of the deal’s cost savings will not come from layoffs.

The company has promised investors it will deliver $6 billion in cost savings from the $110 billion transaction, but Cardinale maintains that non-labor costs will make up the majority. A Hollywood community already reeling from Covid, labor unrest and overall consolidation and contraction has assumed that thousands of workers will be pink-slipped. Independent analyses have projected a similar outcome, and a look back at prior mergers shows they tend to leave a lot of workers out in the cold.

“That notion that $6 billion of cost-related synergies means you’re firing all these people is just completely antiquated,” Cardinale said in an appearance at the Bloomberg Screentime conference Thursday. “If you look at what we have in front of us, most the majority of those cost synergies are related to non-labor spend. We’re going to unify the text stacks across direct-to-consumer. We already did that with Paramount+ and Pluto and BET+. We’ve already done a hell of a job. Then we are going to do the same thing when we bring the HBO universe into this.”

The $110 billion merger is due to close Tuesday, following a lengthy legal battle and a year of negotiations involving multiple suitors.

Real estate is another area of focus in terms of cost-cutting, Cardinale said. “We have real estate at Paramount, when we bought Paramount [in 2025] that people at Paramount didn’t even know they had,” he said. Plus, he continued, “there’s no enterprise resource planning system. You don’t even know what spending goes on across all the divisions. We’re going to optimize for the way we spend marketing dollars. There’s so much that we can do. And again, in any industry that is challenged, any industry, you’re going to have labor-related cost rationalization, but that’s not what’s driving this.”

Cardinale was asked about CEO David Ellison and what has positioned him as one of Hollywood’s leading figures despite a fairly brief LinkedIn page in terms of running major companies.

“Look at him. He’s 43 years old, and look at the talent that he attracts,” the RedBird Capital founder said. “People are incredibly loyal to him. You can’t fake that. And let me tell you, there’s no last name in the world that delivers that. You either ar it or you’re not. And people want to work for him because he’s genuine. authentic.”

Cardinale also pushed back on the perception that Ellison got where he is purely through nepotism given that his father, Larry Ellison, is one of the world’s richest men.

“To go back to the name, you know, he could be a total jerk. This guy is the most humble, nicest guy I think I’ve ever met,” Cardinale said. “He’s not about the glitz and the glamor. He really cares about the industry. He cares about the people, both on the talent side, the content creator side, the people who he’s, you know, attracted to come here, uh, and, you know, he’s gonna do this for the rest of his professional career. And he’s young. And so I actually think he’s the future.”

Ellison as an individual “really motivated me to bet my firm and my career” on the WBD merger, Cardinale said. “The only way Hollywood is gonna move into this next phase, and level the playing field with the guys up north, is you’ve got to turn yourself into more of a technology company.”

Ben Affleck, who has been involved with RedBird on multiple ventures, found “the right way for Hollywood to go figure out how to level the playing field against the Silicon Valley guys” by founding an AI company. He later sold the company, Interpositive, to Netflix.

“Silicon Valley guys. I have a lot of respect for them,” Cardinale added. “They think they’re the IP in the equation. They’re distribution. The IP is the IP in the equation. And what I’m trying to do, and partnering with David and his passion, is to level a playing field for the guys here.”